"Wayne.B" wrote in message
news
On Sun, 05 Oct 2008 14:23:08 -0400, Marty wrote:

Someone asked for an easy way to figure out how fast Skip was traveling.
Well I found a nice little on-line Haversine (the function to compute
the Great Circle distance between two points) calculator.

http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/latlong.html

Just input the coordinates from two of Skips messages that are one hour
apart and out pops the distance in km. You can do a bit of conversion
from there.

From Skips' 1257 abd 1357 points he only traveled 10Kms, about 6nm.


Cool, good find.

Here's another site that uses a more convenient (for SPOT data) input
format, and returns nautical miles:

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~cvm/latlongdist.html

Here's an example from 3:47PM to 5:47PM where they covered 8 nautical
miles in two hours for a VMG of 4 kts. That's not all that bad
considering that they are probably under sail with a knot or two of
Gulf Sream current against them. Looks like they're heading for the
cut through channel in the middle of Frying Pan (Cape Fear) Shoals.
snip

Skippy would be better off going around Cape Fear with plenty of offing
rather than trying that yacht channel at night. It appears the winds are
nothing to be concerned about so the seas can't bee too bad. The only
advantage of transiting the shoal water through the channel might be a
little less current but depending upon the state of the tide there could
even be more current in the cut than going around the Frying Pan shoals.

I'd go outside at night and inside during the day.

Wilbur Hubbard