On Tue, 18 Jan 2005 12:51:00 GMT, "Roger Long"
wrote:

"Wayne.B" wrote in message
.. .
Who has the time to maintain a manual DR track when running at any
kind of speed in congested waters?

My experience has been that waters are usually only congested when the
navigation and visibility are easy enough that you don't need to keep
a running plot on paper. I'm sure there are places that this is isn't
true and I would have the best GPS I could afford if I spent much time
in them. A larger vessel constrained by draft in traffic that was
ranging over a larger area with few fixed navigation aids would be a
good example.

Piloting without GPS now comes into the realm of a sport in itself
(sort of like making a vessel go somewhere without an engine). The
mountain climbing analogy holds. You do it in specific places for the
experience and satisfaction of achieving it. You wouldn't try to get
to a job interview in Manhattan that way.

Speed is also a factor. I spent a couple months trying to decide
whether to buy a power boat or a sail boat. I always envisioned the
power boat with a big GPS, radar, and all the stuff I'm used to from
these boats I associate with professionally:

http://home.maine.rr.com/rlma/WHOIrv.htm

I'm used to congested waters. I used to go out on a busy Sunday
afternoon in a Soling on Boston harbor with someone (usually a girl)
who had never been in a boat before, set the spinnaker, and sail
around. I used to think I was a hot ****. Now I'm old enough to know
that I was just arrogant. I never had a problem with the spinnaker
though and have only returned to the mooring with a hole in the boat
once in my life (on the port side, fortunately). That was the day I
met my wife.

Was your future wife the one that made the hole in the Soling? :-)



Rodney Myrvaagnes NYC J36 Gjo/a


"Be careful. The toe you stepped on yesterday may be connected to the ass you have to kiss today." --Former mayor Ciancia

Was your future wife the one that made the hole in the Soling? :-)


No, but talking to her may have made me slightly less attentive

Actually, I saw the other guy but Boston Harbor used to be (and
probably still is) full of hotshots who like to skim your transom on
port tack like they were in a race. By the time I realized he wasn't
going to do this, it was too late to take evasive action. The
burdened boat is supposed to maintain a predictable course anyway
although there is a fine line between doing this and failing to take
action to avoid a collision. I fault myself for not verifying that I
saw a pair of eyes, or at least a head, and learned.

His story was that he was in a channel and I was crossing it so he had
the right of way. It was arguably a channel because the area is
heavily buoyed and ones in the area were arranged to guide larger
boats to the gaps between a couple of islands but it was not charted
as such and we each would have had 20 feet of water under our keels
anywhere within half a mile.

--

Roger Long