On Sun, 03 Apr 2005 18:47:20 GMT, Rosalie B.
wrote:

Ryk wrote:

I was chatting in the yacht club bar last night about course keeping
at night, and how hard it can be to steer a tight compass course, and
how variable you get steering to other indicators like wind and stars.
Today that leads me to wondering about whether a tight course is
particularly valuable with modern instruments.

An autopilot can steer a much tighter course than I can. So in any
reasonable open water (i.e. not in a very tight canal or coming into a
dock or something), we let it steer. Like someone else mention, we
don't have it hooked to the GPS.

I steer considerably better than my autopilot, but it is getting
old... I'm thinking of a night crossing we did on Lake Ontario last
October. That boat had no auto-pilot and the waves were high enough
that it would have steered badly anyway. The configuration didn't
provide a continuous view of the GPS and we had only hand-held
compasses. (Delivery -- the PO had left the steering compass uncovered
for years and the globe was cloudy to the point of being nearly
opaque.) The result was that we steered mostly seat-of-the-pants with
periodic checks on direction. The track recorded by the GPS looks a
lot like a straight line, but I know my direction was wandering. We
got to our destination much as expected with no surprises. I'm trying
to convince myself that there was no reason to aim for better steering
than we managed.

Ryk