Can you navigate without using GNSS?

[zoidberg]

If that was the system where you counted the number of 'beats" to get a bearing, yes I do.

Yup. But it was a tad more complex than that.....

You had to be able to 'add' and to 'take away' without needing to take your sox off.

Then there was 'racing the count'..... which didn't prove a problem in saily-boats and 'grey funnel liners', but was in twin-jets doing 8 miles a minute across the lanes.

 

[Goldie]

If that was the system where you counted the number of 'beats" to get a bearing, yes I do.

If not, no I don't.

I’m scraping the depths of my memory here, so no guarantees! IIRC, there were 4 of these VHF lighthouses in the English Channel, one at Anvil Point, one on the IOW (Scratchell’s Down?), one somewhere down East and one - I think - on the French side. Having identified which one was transmitting (Ch 88, morse ident) you counted the beats until you reached a null - a missing beat. You then looked up that ‘missing’ beat number on a table to derive a bearing. Repeat with other stations for a cross bearing. That’s what memory tells me anyway!!!!

Edit: zoidberg, I assume that #81 refers to Consol and not VHF lighthouses!

 

[capnsensible]

Fading from my memory but sounds right.

Ah for the days when ships were wood, men were steel. No namby pamby plotters for real sailors.

 

[Birdseye]

god forbid we go back to wood boats.

I still think that the best navigation system is a gps and a paper chart. I see no point in a sextant which is inaccurate and the only use for DR and EPS is to avoid boredom on long passages. Apart from anything else, who keeps a proper log , somethging that is vital for old style nav? As it happens I do - just in case.

To put it another way, why travel by horse when we have invented cars?

 

[capnsensible]

Because not everyone likes to travel by car and plenty enjoy horse riding.

 

[zoidberg]

To put it another way, why travel by horse when we have invented cars?

What comes out of the back end of a horse is better for the environment than what comes out the back end of cars....

And it's easier to recycle a horse, when it's done, than a car.

 

[zoidberg]

Ah for the days when ships were wood, men were steel. No namby pamby plotters for real sailors.

'Wooden ships, iron men, concrete biscuits....'

 

[zoidberg]

Can you navigate without using GNSS?


You can keep Cunliffe..... bow out, Blewitt and Bartlett..... cancel Chichester

Let's hear it for the author of the finest books on small-boat seamanship bar none!

Take the podium, Mike Peyton!

 

[newtothis]

Because not everyone likes to travel by car and plenty enjoy horse riding.

Which is kind of why I try to keep my hand in with the old-school nav that I learned and have the bits of paper to say I can do.
Most of the time I cheat and just look at the screen to see where I am and where I'm going, but I figure that having bothered to learn how to steer without it, I should occasionally practise it.
There was a certain satisfaction in doing a few miles of blind nav and popping up through the hatch to find the nav mark I was heading for was exactly where it should be. (Although a bit discouraging when some bastard went and moved it).

 

[srm]

Of course, but that could be an age thing.

I have been using GNSS since the polar orbit US Navy Transit satellites were introduced, and still treat the services as very nice to have but not essential.

 

[zoidberg]

A wide old nav-instructor once dropped a 'pearl of wisdom' into my ear'ole.....

"Navigation doesn't happen on a screen or a chart table. It happens between the ears...."

.

 

[SaltyC]

A wide old nav-instructor once dropped a 'pearl of wisdom' into my ear'ole.....

"Navigation doesn't happen on a screen or a chart table. It happens between the ears...."

.

It is the artistic interpretation of a science. Lots of variables and experience leads to an artistic conclusion. Wind direction, atmospheric pressure, sea state etc etc etc.

 

[Chiara’s slave]

A wide old nav-instructor once dropped a 'pearl of wisdom' into my ear'ole.....

"Navigation doesn't happen on a screen or a chart table. It happens between the ears...."

.

You don’t meet that many really fat sailors.

 

[MADRIGAL]

To put it another way, why travel by horse when we have invented cars?

But we do sail, even though we could motor.

 

[glynd]

But we do sail, even though we could motor.

Have you seen the price of diesel?