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.

Yes, a tight course is important near shore or other hazards, and
essential in traffic, but is it necessary out on open water? 15
degrees of wandering costs less than 4 percent in course made good and
few cruisers put the effort into trimming sails that efficiently. A DR
track can only be as good as the course keeping. Are there other
reasons than DR to try to steer a tighter course?

I usually don't worry too much about it - I don't link the autopilot
to the GPS, so my crosstrack can wander up to half a mile on a long
days run. However, the problem that often occurs when novices
handsteer is the the x-track is in the wrong direction. That is, they
will invariably fall off to leeward, turning a close reach into a
beat. Or they will be drawn close to shoreward hazards. I used to
call this the "Arny Effect," after a friend who would always head
towards whatever he was looking at.