How do you log your miles.....

[little_roundtop]

Not if my experience with thru-hull logs is anything to go by. They seem to randomly stop working for random periods of time due to fouling.

If I'm anchoring for an overnight stay I always get in the water after settling the boat and go and have a good look at the set of the anchor. I'm in Greece where the water is a bit warmer of course and it's usually clear down to 10m so it's easy to see the thing. I take an old knife with me and on the way back to the boat I pop underneath and clean any muck off the log paddle-wheel. It takes only a couple of minutes.

Both give me peace of mind and help prevent unexpected problems.

 

[Boathook]

I record both log and the GPS trip readings. The log under reads by around 1/2 knot but is interesting to see the difference between the readings when I use the tides.

 

[Bosun Higgs]

Maybe I'm old fashioned but one of my few good habits is to keep a proper paper log with entries ever half hour of everything from baro and wind to position and track. At the end of the day I can total up distance run if I wish and its surprising what other useful info you can gain. Particularly when memory alone is faulty.

Handy a few years later when repeating a journey you have done once before. And it releaves some of the boredom of long passages under autohelm.

 

[KellysEye]

>We also measure the chart. Although you can't do that on ocean passage charts thus we used GPS positions.

>>Why not

Most charts are Mercator projection. Ocean plannnig charts are Gnomonic projection. They show the great circle route, which is the shortest for ocean saling, as a straight line but of course the earth is curved, so if you measure distance it is wrong.