When was the last time you used Dead Reckoning/Estimated Position or took bearings in anger?

[LittleSister]

Will future navigantes no what they missed as the approach an iron bound coast with only a ep.Just sailing to Spain prior to gps etc there was a true sense of accomplishment ?

Do we know what we miss, given that earlier seafarers sailed without compass or charts?

We can't actually know the mindset, skills and knowledge involved.

People sailed for many thousands of years before 'maps' (that we would even recognise as such) were invented. The earliest 'maps' were for a long time far too expensive to be owned by seafarers, let alone carried by ships. Even when charts became common, they had little information, by our standards, and tended to vary in scale across the chart - the areas of interest (hazards, harbour entrances, etc.) were drawn at a larger scale than 'boring' bits of coast of little interest. They weren't interested in exact bearings and distances, as most had no means of measuring these accurately anyway.

Our maps and charts, our related navigational instruments, and more generally the way we understand our world and find our way around seem obvious and rational to us, but they are very culturally specific - in other times and other places they would be meaningless.

Conversely, how other cultures 'navigated' is largely a closed book to us - we can only get hints, and can never fully share the way they conceived their world and found their way about its seas and oceans.

 

[john_morris_uk]

Was that you? - We saw you arrive in Cherbourg and quietly tipped our hats to you

If it was last Friday then yes it was us. We arrived early evening.

 

[Wansworth]

Do we know what we miss, given that earlier seafarers sailed without compass or charts?

We can't actually know the mindset, skills and knowledge involved.

People sailed for many thousands of years before 'maps' (that we would even recognise as such) were invented. The earliest 'maps' were for a long time far too expensive to be owned by seafarers, let alone carried by ships. Even when charts became common, they had little information, by our standards, and tended to vary in scale across the chart - the areas of interest (hazards, harbour entrances, etc.) were drawn at a larger scale than 'boring' bits of coast of little interest. They weren't interested in exact bearings and distances, as most had no means of measuring these accurately anyway.

Our maps and charts, our related navigational instruments, and more generally the way we understand our world and find our way around seem obvious and rational to us, but they are very culturally specific - in other times and other places they would be meaningless.

Conversely, how other cultures 'navigated' is largely a closed book to us - we can only get hints, and can never fully share the way they conceived their world and found their way about its seas and oceans.

David Lewis sailed with the Polynesians who navigated by sensing wave formations deflected by an island etc as an example once the compass was invented man could decide his course.Asanaside I worked in a coaster where the skipper had commanded the last sailing barge trading and he was aware of currents colour of the water all manner of natural details which are not needed as our electronic systems have made us ableto dominate our surroundings,navigation wise

 

[john_morris_uk]

The much quoted ocean racers (Vestus Wind) hitting reefs is often referred to but, I humbly suggest, rarely understood or referred to correctly. Happy to be corrected, but from my reading of the formal accident report they weren’t navigating using a conventional chart plotter at the wrong scale.
Rather the race boat had multiple specialist PC navigation systems below decks. If I recall correctly, they weren’t even using the navigation software on the one PC switched on, but using a specialist race tactics programme. It was not designed for navigation. The race route had also been changed at short notice (to bypass pirate hotspots?) but the navigator had failed to do sufficient passage planning of the new route before leaving harbour. So not an issue of vector charts and wrong zoom on a chart plotter, but (as usual) a series of multiple basic errors, and ultimately not using appropriate navigation processes or systems.
When I looked at the actual location using Navionics (albeit some time later) it was very difficult to see any situation where the dangers were not shown at any sensible scale of zoom. Hence if they had a conventional Raymarine/B&G chart plotter at the helm switched on with a commercially available vector chart they could have seen the danger.

Similarly, and perhaps even more scary, was the Clipper fleet where at least one boat hit South Africa hard, but others were also well into danger in the dark under spinnaker, and one is suspected of touching bottom and still continuing onto the Southern Ocean (alleged by some , I emphasise, not proven and I have no inside knowledge or viewpoint). This was again not due to wrong zoom on chart plotters - but if I recall correctly a bizarre systems where the only nav plotter was below decks and out of sight of the helm and crew on deck, there was AFAIK no appointed on watch navigator, and the skipper and crew were all on deck doing racing manoevers with the spinnakers in the dark - and hence nobody realised, or indeed checked, how close they were to shore / shallows.

These incidents seem to be oft misquoted and largely myth IMHO - but happy to be corrected if anybody has more detailed facts.
Clearly over reliance on chart accuracy in places with old surveys, and indeed over reliance on any single source, is a real issue — but not in the way these examples are often referred to.

Regarding the race boat, IIRC the report I read said that with the software they were using, the navigator had failed to check the passage planned track against dangers at an appropriate scale.

There are loads of stories of cruisers hitting reefs because they thought they knew where they were according to the plotter and trusted it implicitly.

 

[capnsensible]

Do we know what we miss, given that earlier seafarers sailed without compass or charts?

We can't actually know the mindset, skills and knowledge involved.

People sailed for many thousands of years before 'maps' (that we would even recognise as such) were invented. The earliest 'maps' were for a long time far too expensive to be owned by seafarers, let alone carried by ships. Even when charts became common, they had little information, by our standards, and tended to vary in scale across the chart - the areas of interest (hazards, harbour entrances, etc.) were drawn at a larger scale than 'boring' bits of coast of little interest. They weren't interested in exact bearings and distances, as most had no means of measuring these accurately anyway.

Our maps and charts, our related navigational instruments, and more generally the way we understand our world and find our way around seem obvious and rational to us, but they are very culturally specific - in other times and other places they would be meaningless.

Conversely, how other cultures 'navigated' is largely a closed book to us - we can only get hints, and can never fully share the way they conceived their world and found their way about its seas and oceans.

Look on any chart....loadsa wrecks.

 

[LittleSister]

Look on any chart....loadsa wrecks.

That may be why our forebears didn't use charts - too scary!

 

[LittleSister]

David Lewis sailed with the Polynesians who navigated by sensing wave formations deflected by an island etc as an example once the compass was invented man could decide his course.

Yes, the David Lewis books' glimpses into their traditional nav are really interesting. They could steer courses without compasses. Those men (only!) who had been trained from childhood using oral tradition knew, without instruments, the positions on the horizon of particular rising stars (even ones that were invisible from their home island and hadn't been seen by them for generations since the last time their ancestors had ventured that far north), and the positions of other islands near and far in relation to those.

Of course their particular techniques would have been of no use to earlier navigators around Britain, with its cloudy, changeable weather, lack of regular swells, tides, complex coasts and constrained bodies of water. Not to mention a completely different conception of space and geography.

I am not at all knocking our system of navigation, it's an amazing technology which has been wildly successful* in all sorts of ways, and has taken thousands of years to develop - just pointing out that it is very culturally specific, has shaped our own very particular 'common-sense' conceptions of the world, and is not simply a refinement of all that has gone before.

(*Among its 'successes' has been as a tool - both by accident and by design - in the colonisation and subjugation by Europeans most of the world. There are many interesting stories of its role in that. At the same time, the European explorers were very heavily reliant on the local knowledge of the indigenous populations they encountered, both for their survival and to fill in their maps! Interestingly, many of the accounts by by early European explorers of their use of local guides and transporters express their frustration with the locals' typical lack of interest in going anywhere in a straight line and making best speed, and their apparent preference for zig-zagging about and stopping frequently to chatter and rehearse time and again tales of previous visits or other things about the place they are supposedly headed. There was a clash of mindsets as well as technologies.)

 

[Never Grumble]

One of the things we lose is the proper inbuilt scepticism of the navigator. Pre GPS and Decca one spent a lot of time not knowing with 100% accuracy where you were. When you aimed for somewhere you ‘aimed off’ so that when you reached soundings and sighted land you knew which way to turn as you sought identifiable objects to fix off. The good navigator cross checks things. The plotter says I’m here but does that make sense with the depth on the sounder and what I see?

Pre GPS it used to be the key to navigating to use as many different sources of information as possible. I remember Decca was wildly inaccurate, that got me morning watch invite to the COs cabin for a briefing. Visual fixes and cocked hats. I so reminisced the other day I bought myself a copy of the admiralty manual of navigation from the 1990s. Sailing in the solent the other day I even showed my son how to use the tide curves and use them to cross reference with the echo sounder crossing a shallow patch we were accurate to 10cm as we crossed a shallow patch, good enough for govt work, he was able to see how to use this to fix our position.

 

[johnalison]

Do we know what we miss, given that earlier seafarers sailed without compass or charts?

We can't actually know the mindset, skills and knowledge involved.

People sailed for many thousands of years before 'maps' (that we would even recognise as such) were invented. The earliest 'maps' were for a long time far too expensive to be owned by seafarers, let alone carried by ships. Even when charts became common, they had little information, by our standards, and tended to vary in scale across the chart - the areas of interest (hazards, harbour entrances, etc.) were drawn at a larger scale than 'boring' bits of coast of little interest. They weren't interested in exact bearings and distances, as most had no means of measuring these accurately anyway.

Our maps and charts, our related navigational instruments, and more generally the way we understand our world and find our way around seem obvious and rational to us, but they are very culturally specific - in other times and other places they would be meaningless.

Conversely, how other cultures 'navigated' is largely a closed book to us - we can only get hints, and can never fully share the way they conceived their world and found their way about its seas and oceans.

Very true, though I think I have seen references to prehistoric markings that were thought to have been maps. This is a nautical chart, Pacific style (because I can't remember if it was Polynesian or Micronesian). It obviously represents a different way of thinking about the ocean.

 

[Wansworth]

Yes, the David Lewis books' glimpses into their traditional nav are really interesting. They could steer courses without compasses. Those men (only!) who had been trained from childhood using oral tradition knew, without instruments, the positions on the horizon of particular rising stars (even ones that were invisible from their home island and hadn't been seen by them for generations since the last time their ancestors had ventured that far north), and the positions of other islands near and far in relation to those.

Of course their particular techniques would have been of no use to earlier navigators around Britain, with its cloudy, changeable weather, lack of regular swells, tides, complex coasts and constrained bodies of water. Not to mention a completely different conception of space and geography.

I am not at all knocking our system of navigation, it's an amazing technology which has been wildly successful* in all sorts of ways, and has taken thousands of years to develop - just pointing out that it is very culturally specific, has shaped our own very particular 'common-sense' conceptions of the world, and is not simply a refinement of all that has gone before.

(*Among its 'successes' has been as a tool - both by accident and by design - in the colonisation and subjugation by Europeans most of the world. There are many interesting stories of its role in that. At the same time, the European explorers were very heavily reliant on the local knowledge of the indigenous populations they encountered, both for their survival and to fill in their maps! Interestingly, many of the accounts by by early European explorers of their use of local guides and transporters express their frustration with the locals' typical lack of interest in going anywhere in a straight line and making best speed, and their apparent preference for zig-zagging about and stopping frequently to chatter and rehearse time and again tales of previous visits or other things about the place they are supposedly headed. There was a clash of mindsets as well as technologies.)

Ah so you read Jonathan Raban s book………..Vancouver wasa gratnavigator

 

[srm]

Of course their particular techniques would have been of no use to earlier navigators around Britain, with its cloudy, changeable weather, lack of regular swells, tides,

Well the Shetland Isles are part of Britain (despite all those poor navigators who think a transit of the Caledonian Canal from the south coat qualifies as "Round Britain.").

When first there in the mid 70's I met an old fisherman, who must have been well in to his 70's. His first job was crew on a six oared fishing boat and they used to leave Scalloway on the Shetland mainland and "Row Foula Down". He said the best thing that could happen was a fair wind, as they always rowed when the wind was forward of the beam.

Foula is around 20 miles west of Scalloway and is 418 m high with spectacular cliffs on the west side. They rowed until the Kame was near or below their horizon, (around another 40 miles) then started fishing. The 'Haf' fishing had been carried out in this way without compass or other navigation aids up to the late 1880's when a dry card compass became common in the boats. Like their Norse ancestors they navigated up to the turn of the last century by nature, one key indicator of direction being the "Moderdia", the mother wave or a ground swell that runs towards the land. The Shetland Isles can often be lost in cloud or fog, so the navigator had to know much more than identifying the distant peaks, and the tidal streams around Shetland can be strong making modern navigation interesting.

If we look further back at the Norse expansion and settlement across the northern waters their navigation skills and seamanship are worthy of great respect, even allowing for a more settled and predictable climate in that time.

 

[LittleSister]

Very true, though I think I have seen references to prehistoric markings that were thought to have been maps.

Yes, that's why I put 'maps' in scare quotes above. There are various graphical representations of places, going back to e.g. ancient Egyptian and Babylonian civilisations, though it took a very long time to evolve to include the elements we take for granted.

This is a nautical chart, Pacific style (because I can't remember if it was Polynesian or Micronesian). It obviously represents a different way of thinking about the ocean.

Yes, I have pictures in books of this 'chart' and various other 'map-like' things from various other cultures. The Inuit (or was it some other Arctic dwellers) had pocket sized bone carvings they carried with them in their kayaks, shaped to represent the inlets and headlands around the area they travelled, fished and hunted.

An intriguing tale which runs somewhat counter to my general argument earlier is (I can't remember exact details) of a British ship in the age of exploration, returning to a pair of islands in the Pacific(?) reported by a previous expedition. They couldn't find one of the islands, landed on the other and sought advice from the chief of the island. He used a stick to draw on the earth floor of his hut a map of its location in relation to his own island, adding a third island the visitors didn't know about. One of the British officers made a sketch of what the chief had drawn. That sketch remains in the archives, and is reproduced in a book I have, alongside a modern chart of the area, which it corresponds with remarkably. So even though map making, as we would know it, was alien to the islanders, there was a shared understanding of geographical dispositions and 'scaled' graphic representations of them.

Although Ptolemy and others described over 2,000 years ago how to make maps as we would know them (and catalogued the coordinates of thousands of locations), many early 'European' maps didn't attempt to follow those principles, and were more focused on symbolic relationships than mathematical/geographical precision. There is, too, an interesting evolution from (often rather fanciful) pictorial representations of places towards what we would expect from map.

I was going to say 'don't get me started', but it's obviously too late!

 

[LittleSister]

Ah so you read Jonathan Raban s book………..Vancouver wasa gratnavigator

Yes, several times! Passage to Juneau is one of my favourite books.

But I've found similar in tales of Europeans exploring the interior of Africa. It seems that maps have replaced an awful lot of chattering and dithering!

 

[Wansworth]

Yes, several times! Passage to Juneau is one of my favourite books.

But I've found similar in tales of Europeans exploring the interior of Africa. It seems that maps have replaced an awful lot of chattering and dithering!

Yes lots of material that affords several reads.Interesting looking at vids of the Inside passage showing the steep wooded sides which makes sense of the Indians living on the water or narrow habitable land along the shore……and you marvel at the skill in maneuvering square rigged ships in narrow waters

 

[LittleSister]

Yes lots of material that affords several reads.Interesting looking at vids of the Inside passage showing the steep wooded sides which makes sense of the Indians living on the water or narrow habitable land along the shore……and you marvel at the skill in maneuvering square rigged ships in narrow waters

Not only narrow, but uncharted!

They did have a few mishaps, though! And much of the surveying (and forward reconnaissance, perhaps?) was done in small boats. They must have done an awful lot of rowing!

The skill, fortitude and bravery involved, though, is certainly impressive. Never mind the ship handling, just going ashore to fetch water and food would have been a scary endeavour each and every time, not knowing what you'd encounter or how friendly any natives, bears or anything else might be.

 

[Wansworth]

But the portrait of poor old Van he was not cut out for being a chief,great navigator but not a leader.

 

[LittleSister]

But the portrait of poor old Van he was not cut out for being a chief,great navigator but not a leader.

True, but the gang of young aristocrats he was lumbered with made it especially difficult for him, particularly as he'd come from a relatively lowly background and they 'naturally' looked down on him for it. There are few who could successfully lead in such circumstances, I suspect.

That he was a miserable old git, and prone to depression, away from civilisation and from home for years on end pursuing a thankless task (searching every last inlet and opening, of thousands, to make sure it wasn't the other end of a North-West passage he doubted existed) didn't help much either!

That Vancouver and the young aristocrats were also from two different cultural eras added another layer of aggravation. He was a died in the wool old duffer, meticulous and dogged, whereas the carefree young blades had been reading the romantic poets and all that jazz. A key revelation in the book for me was how they yawned (at least metaphorically) while Vancouver was waxing lyrical in his diary or whatever about these nice gentle slopes (quite possibly around what is now 'Vancouver'!) that would be ideal for settlement; and then when they were among towering overhanging cliffs dripping with rain and waterfalls, Vancouver thought it horribly, oppressingly gloomy, while they were ecstatic - this was THE SUBLIME!

It's sad that, despite all that he achieved and endured, he was shafted when he got back to England, and is largely overlooked in the history books.

On the bright side he does remain King's Lynn's only famous son (apart from some geezer who was in a pop band).

 

[newtothis]

That he was a miserable old git, and prone to depression, away from civilisation and from home for years on end pursuing a thankless task (searching every last inlet and opening, of thousands, to make sure it wasn't the other end of a North-West passage he doubted existed) didn't help much either!
He was a died in the wool old duffer,

He was dead at 40, so err, maybe go a bit easy on the age thing.
There's many a poster on here that barely remember what they were doing in their 40s.

 

[thinwater]

I've sailed the same area so long I seldom use GPS within sight of land, or take bearings. No need.

I did have a double GPS failure off the east coast once (one got wet from a big wave, the other was old and died several days before) about 20 years ago. I had been logging lat/lon every 4 hours, the boat had been sailing on autopilot (so course was steady), so I just went to DR for the next 16 hours. At landfall I was off by about 1/4 mile heading and maybe 5 miles on distance (no knot meter--mostly guessed). Close enough. For certain, when crossing an ocean you should log position at least daily, just in case.

 

[Uricanejack]

The last time I went out sailing. Likely use it again next time.
Still one of the first things I teach people to do.
While assessing someone’s ability, it’s one of the things I look for,
Those who do it are generally far and way better at maintaining situational awareness.. Or more importantly much less likely to loose it.