GPS price OK - WHAT, £300+ for charts !!!

Spirit (of Glenans) said:
Probably also a major contributor to incidents leading to lifeboat shouts when used by those without solid paper chart background.
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You think paper charts have some magical property that negates the need for training? Get real, any system needs proper training, but a plotter needs less training. I'd place my bets on someone with zero training and a plotter over someone with zero training and a paper chart any day of the week. Some people seem to think nobody got lost before GPS. EVERYONE got lost before GPS! If you weren't absolutely elated to hit the channel islands after 13 hours on paper charts then you were massively overconfident!
 
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Daydream believer said:
How long does the battery last? How does one hold it & use it, whilst hanging on to the tiller in F6 with the boat rocking, rolling & broaching all over the place? How does it react to a dollop of water over the side when least expected? Finally, how do you see it in sunlight.
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Answers.
About 3/4 hours 30 or 40 miles.
On floor of the flybridge,in the shade of the instrument panel, a Mk1 foot keeping it there.
One hand holding onto the steering wheel while the other is pushing the autopilot button which keeps a far better heading than me.
Water getting upstairs ? time to step up into the dinghy ?
Finally with lots of water underneath , its a rapid descent downstairs to the tranquilty of the saloon, over to a bolted down plotter and cup of tea.
Course thats in a motorboat, why one would make life more difficult or more ardous in a different tpye of boat is a mystery to some . ?
 
oldgit said:
Course thats in a motorboat, why one would make life more difficult or more ardous in a different tpye of boat is a mystery to some . ?
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The ability to have an almost unlimited range & to leave port, when it is a "bit choppy". Plus, of course the enjoyment factor of a totally different sport; to one of finding fuel dumps, before one can go anywhere.
 
lustyd said:
You think paper charts have some magical property that negates the need for training? Get real, any system needs proper training, but a plotter needs less training. I'd place my bets on someone with zero training and a plotter over someone with zero training and a paper chart any day of the week. Some people seem to think nobody got lost before GPS. EVERYONE got lost before GPS! If you weren't absolutely elated to hit the channel islands after 13 hours on paper charts then you were massively overconfident!
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I don’t think anyone has suggested that paper charts have some form of magical property, but they do encourage àn element of learning which is advantageous, too many believe that the gps alleviates any need to learn the basics of navigation, and just follow it without thinking, and we can all recite examples of this on land where artic’s have ended up stuck in country roads or cars have ended up in deep fords because this was the route the gps gave.
As to everyone getting lost before gps, absolute rubbish, We happily navigated around Brittany and the Channel Islands with paper charts and pilot books long before the advent of gps, and always found the point we were looking for. True we did have a RDF on board, but this was an aid to navigation, not an absolute essential.
No I am not a luddite, I do have a chart plotter on board beside my navigation table (it doesn’t extend out into the cockpit), as well as AIS and Navtex, I have even ditched my pyrotechnics in favour of LED and PLB, but still enjoy the mental effort in plotting my course/position on a paper chart.
 
Daydream believer said:
The ability to have an almost unlimited range & to leave port, when it is a "bit choppy". Plus, of course the enjoyment factor of a totally different sport; to one of finding fuel dumps, before one can go anywhere.
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It's funny, because any time we discuss electric propulsion the "unlimited range" of yachts is immediately forgotten ;)
 
Praxinoscope said:
but they do encourage àn element of learning which is advantageous, too many believe that the gps alleviates any need to learn the basics of navigation, and just follow it without thinking
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People that don't want to learn won't learn on any system. People that do are fine with either. Paper charts bring nothing to the table in this regard.
It's nice that you're so confident in your navigation and always knew precisely where you were, did you ever enter a harbour in the fog just based on your DR? Most people with any sense admitted they only knew roughly where they were before GPS, and actually needed to see the land again to confirm it.
 
#46, Yes several times. I seem to remember that when I took the YM exam (over 40 years ago) I had to pretend loss of visibility so navigated a blind entry into Lymington, OK I accept I did ask the watch the bearings of my chosen marks, but otherwise near to zero visibility conditions.
Of course it’s easier with a gps, but if I was looking for an easy hobby I wouldn’t have chosen to mess about in boats and sail in particular.
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I should have added that my request for bearings of a couple of marks resulted in the reaction that the fog was too thick and they couldn’t see any marks, so having been put in my place I had to rely upon contours, log readings and the hope that the helm was sensible enough not to head straight into a solid object.
 
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Praxinoscope said:
OK I accept I did ask the watch the bearings of my chosen marks
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So...you're imagining your skills then? Entering a harbour you know you're next to in pretend fog is extremely different than arriving at the other side of the channel and being confident you're following the contours into St Malo in zero visibility after a long passage. I get that you're enthusiastic, but you're not being realistic about navigation before electronic assistance.
Most of the skills involved in paper based navigation were about understanding that you were not certain of your position and mitigating that fact.
 
#48, No I am not being unrealistic about my navigation before electronics, put it down to a thorough grounding in reading OS maps followed by enthusiastically following the RYA shore based syllabus to adjust my OS knowledge to chart work.
For reference Lymington was not a harbour I was particularly familiar with, so the blind nav’ was I think still a fair exercise and a demonstration of my navigation competence,.
But as you obviously think all paper based chart work was basically a combination of chance and hope with a bit of calculation thrown in, making it rather inaccurate, I really feel that there is no point in continuing to recall the passages I and my various crews achieved using DR without the aid of modern electronics, so I am signing out on this thread as it just becomes a circular discussion.
 
No question that GPS is wonderful and the ability to have a good position fix on demand is like magic. I suppose I could go back to old Nav, and get used to not having that, we used to manage after all… but I really really like having that fix when I need it.

Really my point was that I can have this, and indeed a whole lot more, at very low cost. I’m not convinced that ‘being able to afford it’ is a very good reason for buying anything, and I’m not at all convinced that being able to interface my plotter to my fish finder & stereo would make me any happier. Which is why I didn’t do it! that’s all
 
Still missing the point. OS maps are nothing like sea navigation. The land doesn’t move about while you’re in thick fog. The very basics of paper navigation at sea is a lack of confidence in where you are. Aim to arrive up tide for instance, so you know which side you’re probably on and which way to follow a contour. Use multiple sources such as depth and bearing to build confidence in position. If you were 100% confident of your exact position in thick fog after a channel crossing then you were fooling yourself.
You claim that paper navigation made people better navigators but seem to know nothing about it.
 
gdallas said:
No question that GPS is wonderful and the ability to have a good position fix on demand is like magic. I suppose I could go back to old Nav, and get used to not having that, we used to manage after all… but I really really like having that fix when I need it.

Really my point was that I can have this, and indeed a whole lot more, at very low cost. I’m not convinced that ‘being able to afford it’ is a very good reason for buying anything, and I’m not at all convinced that being able to interface my plotter to my fish finder & stereo would make me any happier. Which is why I didn’t do it! that’s all
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I take the view that being able to afford a potentially life saving bit of kit is a very very good reason for buying it.
 
These days, hair shirts are for peole who don’t have GPS. Though there may be a sniff of it on board classic boats without winches, but at least that’s historically accurate.
 
Daydream believer said:
The ability to have an almost unlimited range & to leave port, when it is a "bit choppy". Plus, of course the enjoyment factor of a totally different sport; to one of finding fuel dumps, before one can go anywhere.
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And judging by the numbers of yachts ashore on the hard outside my window for six months of the year the number of boats actually doing that is somewhat limited to say the least.?
 
gdallas said:
No question that GPS is wonderful and the ability to have a good position fix on demand is like magic. I suppose I could go back to old Nav, and get used to not having that, we used to manage after all… but I really really like having that fix when I need it.

Really my point was that I can have this, and indeed a whole lot more, at very low cost. I’m not convinced that ‘being able to afford it’ is a very good reason for buying anything, and I’m not at all convinced that being able to interface my plotter to my fish finder & stereo would make me any happier. Which is why I didn’t do it! that’s all
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Its all about what you want to do on the water in your boat, some boats never seem to leave the hard, some never leave the marina, some fish onboard, some don't, neither is right or wrong, all of which makes choice of boat and equipment so personal.
 
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