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Baybyter wrote:
In a message dated 12/20/2004 1:43:11 PM Eastern Standard Time, writes: How many boats have you been on in the past five or so years that have on their nav table: a divider, a chart ruler, or anything like these simple and other nav instruments? I would guess you have found very few, indeed if any. Ahoy: I have to admit that (1) my boat does have a nav table, dividers, and other simple chart plotting tools, and that (2) I hardly ever use them.... I'm not sure what other boater friends of mine have, but you've peaked my curiousity to find out. Having said all this, I also agree that most of us do, in fact, depend on the GPS alone more often than not. But if you are like me, I also have something of an "eyeball DR" going on in my head almost all of the time. This served me well once when I was navigating a course on the GPS to a distant marker. At some point, the "eyeball DR" in my brain kicked in to say that what I was seeing did not look right. I was way off course. It turned out that I had transposed the waypoints for my destination when I loaded them into my GPS....It was an interesting lesson that happily ended well Good sailing to you. w. I'm not sure where anchorlt made the above comments - they don't show on my servers or google. But ... I'm a bit surprised at the comments - Certainly most of the long time boaters I know have these tools and know how to use them. I'll admit that most of them have given in to the temptation of relying on GPS, but I'm sure all of them could cope with a sudden outage. For my own part, I've lost GPS several times and found that I could revert to traditional rather quickly if the need arises. As you say, a mental DR is always maintained. Although my boat is set up for computerized nav, I usually don't keep a computer onboard. My GPS is 8 years old, and I haven't bothered getting the charting chips for most areas I cruise to. Every year I do at least one trip without GPS, just to stay in practice. As for tools, I keep a set in a plastic box that comes on deck for longer trips, or iffy weather. Although I don't often do running fixes on deck, I usually do a few set and drift calculations a year. Frankly, there's not much else to do when you're on a 4 hour watch; you might as well practice navigation. (My wife, OTOH, saves a stack of magazines to read while she's on watch, and thinks I'm just being geeky ...) |
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