Nobody really needs to know how to navigate anymore, do they?

[Jim Cate]

When we were voyaging using celestial, we tried to get morning and evening stars plus a noon fix. If we were prevented from doing this for a day (clouds, etc) we got antsy, but were pretty happy with one decent fix a day. If the clouds persisted, each additional day increased the anxiety as the DR line extended. On one passage from Hawaii to SF we had eleven days straight of overcast, and I was pretty damn worried. It cleared on the evening of the eleventh day and we got a good fix... only about 60 miles from the Farallones... just in time!

Then came sat-nav. With that device, one usually got a pretty decent fix every few hours... how cool was that! But then, if we missed a few and had no fix for half a day, I got antsy, even though i still knew our position with greater accuracy than when we were doing celestial!

And when GPS finally arrived, we knew just where we were ALL the time. Wonderful... but if something went wrong and the GPS shut down for a while (and it did in the early days, both for local and governmental reasons) I became antsy in a really short time.

How our expectations have evolved! But I still carry the gear necessary to do celestial, and know from experience that I can eventually find our location. I'd be rusty at first, but I know that in the long run, all will be well. And I know that NOT knowing our accurate location for a few hours is not the end of the world... even for a few days.

Oh... of course I carry paper charts. Most are "out of date" by years, but for this usage that matters not. Islands and continents are still pretty much where they were when Cook did his surveys, and for disaster recovery, that's good enough!

Jim

[StuM]

Originally Posted by El Pinguino

In the southern hemisphere it is exceedingly simple to find 'south' using the Southern Cross and the two 'Pointers'.

Only when they're above the horizon - they frequently aren't for me.

East and west?.... just use the centre of Orion's belt when its rising or setting.

Unless it's winter, when Orion transits during the day

[El Pinguino]

Originally Posted by capngeo

It would seem we old farts (as in those who learned to navigate before all the gizmos) seem to have the question down..... the newbies not so much

Golly, I'm always being told that I'm an old phart and there were plenty of gizmos out there when I started learning...... you must be as old as Jim...

[El Pinguino]

Originally Posted by StuM

Only when they're above the horizon - they frequently aren't for me.



Unless it's winter, when Orion transits during the day

Of course... how foolish of me.... but if it transits during the day you will at least have it rising or setting at one twilight or or other and can work from that... you know... subtract 180* - or add if you so choose... either works what with there being 360* in a circle and all.... to find the one you aren't observing.

I'm no end surprised you haven't mentioned that - where you are - you can simply apply the declination as required to the rising or setting sun will get a more than adequate idea of east or west.
Calculating the dec is easypeasy without access to tables....

[Bulawayo]

100% agreed, Jim. Much the same experiences and feelings.

Originally Posted by Jim Cate

When we were voyaging using celestial, we tried to get morning and evening stars plus a noon fix. If we were prevented from doing this for a day (clouds, etc) we got antsy, but were pretty happy with one decent fix a day. If the clouds persisted, each additional day increased the anxiety as the DR line extended. On one passage from Hawaii to SF we had eleven days straight of overcast, and I was pretty damn worried. It cleared on the evening of the eleventh day and we got a good fix... only about 60 miles from the Farallones... just in time!

Then came sat-nav. With that device, one usually got a pretty decent fix every few hours... how cool was that! But then, if we missed a few and had no fix for half a day, I got antsy, even though i still knew our position with greater accuracy than when we were doing celestial!

And when GPS finally arrived, we knew just where we were ALL the time. Wonderful... but if something went wrong and the GPS shut down for a while (and it did in the early days, both for local and governmental reasons) I became antsy in a really short time.

How our expectations have evolved! But I still carry the gear necessary to do celestial, and know from experience that I can eventually find our location. I'd be rusty at first, but I know that in the long run, all will be well. And I know that NOT knowing our accurate location for a few hours is not the end of the world... even for a few days.

Oh... of course I carry paper charts. Most are "out of date" by years, but for this usage that matters not. Islands and continents are still pretty much where they were when Cook did his surveys, and for disaster recovery, that's good enough!

Jim

[Bulawayo]

I think you'll find sunset today is at 18h22 for the Azores. You need to go back a month to get a sunset after 8pm. I did find another website that puts the sunset one hour later - great to have concensus. Regardless, as you are further south it shall set even earlier.
Did you mean transit? How can the sun transit at 21h45?

Originally Posted by boatman61

No way.. its not dark till 2015 this time of year.. normal transat time its around 2145

[zboss]

I'm not against having sextants and paper chart on board as a mitigation plan. However, I DO think that your chances of needing to use them are almost non-existent.

Originally Posted by Bulawayo

Zboss, what happens when the military turn off the GPS as happened during the first Gulf War?

Simply not going to happen. GPS is available right now in war zones all around the world. How do all those "war correspondents" find their way to the Starbucks in Allepo? Also, most devices work one at least two GPS systems (US and Russia). Any jamming is unlikely to be more than regional and certainly not in the middle of the ocean. Electronic Charts and compasses still work in that instance. In fact, most modern autopilots will work just off magnetic course heading using its very non-GPS chip.

Originally Posted by Bulawayo

What happens when/if you suffer total 12v system collapse?

Also not likely and certainly recoverable - even in the case where you have partial flooding or fire that took the battery bank.

Most/Many cruisers have four independent methods of charging batteries - solar, wind, alternator, and generator. Even in the worse case scenario, all four power systems fail, you can still run a tiny handheld GPS off AA batteries for months (or like we have) a portable solar panel kept for just such occasions.

Heck, you could even string together eight or nine AA batteries to power your chartplotter for a minute - enough to get a fix.

Originally Posted by Bulawayo

If you are struck by lightning mid-ocean?

We were struck by lightning. Doesn't seem to matter WHERE you get struck from lightning it should have the same effect. Took out just one chartplotter. We have over a dozen different electronic methods of plotting position, including five devices that all have the same charts as our chartplotter.

Originally Posted by Bulawayo

Sextants dont 'just' break any more than your arm 'just' breaks. Nor do they simply 'fall' overboard.

And that means it won't happen? I just read a story about someone who's sextant mirror broke - he dropped it. I don't think its any more likely that you would lose over a dozen GPS devices at once than it is that you trip and drop the sextant overboard.

Anyhow, I was making a kind of joke.

We have these discussions once every few months and as far as I can recall no one has come back to say "I was stuck in the middle of the ocean when we were struck by lightning and lost all electronic plotting mechanisms" where such a situation took place in the last five years. Its always "I heard a story once" and that was back in 1992 when you would be lucky to have a single GPS onboard, let alone more than a dozen. Its simply not a likely scenario because there are GPS's in everything now - even wrist watches.

I think with the ubiquity of GPS devices being so common these days that it very unlikely that all your devices will be destroyed at once, especially when you take simple counter measures (no more complicated measures than securing your sextant box).

I grant and concede to you that if you have just a single device onboard capable of getting your location, course, speed, and so forth from a GPS fix and you are crossing an ocean and have not taken measures to store backup nav equipment in a way to keep it safe from electric storms... you are stupid and deserve to fall off the edge of the planet. I'll also concede that you need to power some of these devices.

I feel that the likelihood of finding yourself with no way of electronically fixing your position is very low and those days are quickly waning further for the prudent mariner. Its SO low, I am more concerned about dewatering, cracking my water or diesel tanks, blowing a piece of rigging, ad so forth that are much more likely to happen.

Really, if this was something that was being reported by dozens of mariners every year than I would probably put more emphasis on paper charts and sextants but the facts are - its not happening in abundance. Maybe once a year at most?

Can ANYBODY show me a dozen accounts from this year where the mariner was out in the middle of the ocean, got struck by lightning and lost all their electronic positioning systems?

[Bulawayo]

I apologise to you....I didnt realise you were so perfect and that you carry so many charging systems that are lightning proof AND that you also carry a dozen GPS's (why?). I dont accept that most cruisers carry so many charge devices either - maybe where you cruise but not from the interaction I have with cruisers - rarely do they have the four you mention. One person breaking a mirror doesnt make it a common issue for sextants either. Its not that you might loose every GPS device on board, it is the practicalities of subsequant action when many do not know even how to run a DR plot or have a small scale chart on board. There are so many misconceptions about basic nav skills as has already been demonstrated by some people with obviously no practical knowledge and no real experience. On that point you could be correct as those people will never really be mid-ocean so shall its not relevant!!

Originally Posted by zboss

I'm not against having sextants and paper chart on board as a mitigation plan. However, I DO think that your chances of needing to use them are almost non-existent.



Simply not going to happen. GPS is available right now in war zones all around the world. How do all those "war correspondents" find their way to the Starbucks in Allepo? Also, most devices work one at least two GPS systems (US and Russia). Any jamming is unlikely to be more than regional and certainly not in the middle of the ocean. Electronic Charts and compasses still work in that instance. In fact, most modern autopilots will work just off magnetic course heading using its very non-GPS chip.





Also not likely and certainly recoverable - even in the case where you have partial flooding or fire that took the battery bank.

Most/Many cruisers have four independent methods of charging batteries - solar, wind, alternator, and generator. Even in the worse case scenario, all four power systems fail, you can still run a tiny handheld GPS off AA batteries for months (or like we have) a portable solar panel kept for just such occasions.

Heck, you could even string together eight or nine AA batteries to power your chartplotter for a minute - enough to get a fix.



We were struck by lightning. Doesn't seem to matter WHERE you get struck from lightning it should have the same effect. Took out just one chartplotter. We have over a dozen different electronic methods of plotting position, including five devices that all have the same charts as our chartplotter.



And that means it won't happen? I just read a story about someone who's sextant mirror broke - he dropped it. I don't think its any more likely that you would lose over a dozen GPS devices at once than it is that you trip and drop the sextant overboard.

Anyhow, I was making a kind of joke.

We have these discussions once every few months and as far as I can recall no one has come back to say "I was stuck in the middle of the ocean when we were struck by lightning and lost all electronic plotting mechanisms" where such a situation took place in the last five years. Its always "I heard a story once" and that was back in 1992 when you would be lucky to have a single GPS onboard, let alone more than a dozen. Its simply not a likely scenario because there are GPS's in everything now - even wrist watches.

I think with the ubiquity of GPS devices being so common these days that it very unlikely that all your devices will be destroyed at once, especially when you take simple counter measures (no more complicated measures than securing your sextant box).

I grant and concede to you that if you have just a single device onboard capable of getting your location, course, speed, and so forth from a GPS fix and you are crossing an ocean and have not taken measures to store backup nav equipment in a way to keep it safe from electric storms... you are stupid and deserve to fall off the edge of the planet. I'll also concede that you need to power some of these devices.

I feel that the likelihood of finding yourself with no way of electronically fixing your position is very low and those days are quickly waning further for the prudent mariner. Its SO low, I am more concerned about dewatering, cracking my water or diesel tanks, blowing a piece of rigging, ad so forth that are much more likely to happen.

Really, if this was something that was being reported by dozens of mariners every year than I would probably put more emphasis on paper charts and sextants but the facts are - its not happening in abundance. Maybe once a year at most?

Can ANYBODY show me a dozen accounts from this year where the mariner was out in the middle of the ocean, got struck by lightning and lost all their electronic positioning systems?

[Pelagic]

Originally Posted by Jim Cate

When we were voyaging using celestial, we tried to get morning and evening stars plus a noon fix. If we were prevented from doing this for a day (clouds, etc) we got antsy, but were pretty happy with one decent fix a day. If the clouds persisted, each additional day increased the anxiety as the DR line extended. On one passage from Hawaii to SF we had eleven days straight of overcast, and I was pretty damn worried. It cleared on the evening of the eleventh day and we got a good fix... only about 60 miles from the Farallones... just in time!

Then came sat-nav. With that device, one usually got a pretty decent fix every few hours... how cool was that! But then, if we missed a few and had no fix for half a day, I got antsy, even though i still knew our position with greater accuracy than when we were doing celestial!

And when GPS finally arrived, we knew just where we were ALL the time. Wonderful... but if something went wrong and the GPS shut down for a while (and it did in the early days, both for local and governmental reasons) I became antsy in a really short time.

How our expectations have evolved! But I still carry the gear necessary to do celestial, and know from experience that I can eventually find our location. I'd be rusty at first, but I know that in the long run, all will be well. And I know that NOT knowing our accurate location for a few hours is not the end of the world... even for a few days.

Oh... of course I carry paper charts. Most are "out of date" by years, but for this usage that matters not. Islands and continents are still pretty much where they were when Cook did his surveys, and for disaster recovery, that's good enough!

Jim

Spot on Jim....however in some areas you get antsy a bit quicker....

When cruising the Caroline islands pre-GPS ...early Sat-Nav fixes at that latitude were about once a day.

Celestial and DR was full on when running a 180ft exploration charter yacht in order to time our arrivals close enough to a noon entry.

Lots of low lying atols to come to grief on and a lot of nerve racking decisions in the wee hours as to when to slow down, when bad weather made for poor accuracy and either way too early an arrival or too late, meant another uncomfortable night of steaming back and forth before entering the pass after 10am.
Thank god we had a good radar!

I would hate to have to go back to that situation again....... But...I think because of the navigational challenges..... we did have the atols to ourselves in those days.

[transmitterdan]

Most cruisers have many GPS units on board. Every smart phone has one. Most tablet computer have one. And most cruisers carry one or two hand held GPS devices. It would be a rare cruising boat indeed that did not have at least 4-5 GPS enabled devices on board. The odds that all of these would be incapacitated simultaneously is so extraordinarily low as to be insignificant. As long as you know your latitude sometime in the last few days one can easily sail by compass alone until running into land. Then ask somebody where is the beer (oh, and where are we)?

Please stop scaring people with needless stress because they don't know how to use a sextant. It's ok, you will never need a sextant, ever.

[K_V_B]

Originally Posted by Bulawayo

Zboss, what happens when the military turn off the GPS as happened during the first Gulf War?

Actually the military did no such thing. In fact, they did the opposite. They turned off S/A, so we got to enjoy <10m precision with civilian receivers for the first time.
Clinton later ordered the Military to switch off S/A for good.

What happens when/if you suffer total 12v system collapse?

This happend to me on a crossing (not on my boat). We continued with portable GPS-es (turned out that we had a total of 12 GPS devices amongst ourselves, there were 6 of us...)

If you are struck by lightning mid-ocean?

This is also quite rare. But I would be prepared for that. A portable GPS in a tin, together with a solar charger...

[jackdale]

For me the sextant verges on a spiritual experience that keeps me in touch with the universe, just like being at one with the boat under sail.

[K_V_B]

I think your best defence against everything is always knowledge. The Dutch sailor Henk Bezemer once sailed a smal 5m70 plywood boat across from Europe to the Azores with nothing but a cheap watch, some maps, a few pencils, a couple of rulers, and probably a lot of guts.
And he got to his destination.

Before there was the sextant people used a Jacob's staff. And it is quite easy to improvise one with stuff you would probably have on board a yacht. Bezemer just used a ruler and a piece of twine he stuck between his teeth.
(A piece of string is a very handy navigation tool. We would just use a piece of string to hunt for useful alignments to guide us through the rock strewn Brittany coast.)

Not exactly accurate. But good enough he made it to the Azores.

In order to do that what you need to know is not certain techniques, but you need to know how basically navigation works. And learning celestial navigation is a good way of learning this, even if you never intend to practice it. I think that this is the reason why the Navy teaches it. For similar reasons they also teach people to sail.

[jackdale]

Originally Posted by K_V_B

I think your best defence against everything is always knowledge. The Dutch sailor Henk Bezemer once sailed a smal 5m70 plywood boat across from Europe to the Azores with nothing but a cheap watch, some maps, a few pencils, a couple of rulers, and probably a lot of guts.
And he got to his destination.

Steve Callahan used 3 pencils held together by rubber bands and the compass rose on a chart to determine his latitude. Longitude was by DR.

[Stumble]

Originally Posted by Bulawayo

I apologise to you....I didnt realise you were so perfect and that you carry so many charging systems that are lightning proof AND that you also carry a dozen GPS's (why?). I dont accept that most cruisers carry so many charge devices either - maybe where you cruise but not from the interaction I have with cruisers - rarely do they have the four you mention. One person breaking a mirror doesnt make it a common issue for sextants either. Its not that you might loose every GPS device on board, it is the practicalities of subsequant action when many do not know even how to run a DR plot or have a small scale chart on board. There are so many misconceptions about basic nav skills as has already been demonstrated by some people with obviously no practical knowledge and no real experience. On that point you could be correct as those people will never really be mid-ocean so shall its not relevant!!

Why would someone have half a dozen gps' devices on board? Simple, because we live in the real world. Just on a coastal cruise my wife and I will have at least, 2 iPhones, 2 iPads, my watch, 2 chart plotters, one handheld GPS, 2 handheld vhf's. All of those devices are capable of displaying a GPS fix. So our minimum number of GPS chips on board is 10 separate devices with the redundant ability to derive a fix.

Now we don't have a generator or solar installed because we just coastal cruise for now, but three of those devices can operate off of batteries we have stored on board for weeks at a minimum, and I find we needed to could easily shut down everything else to preserve battery life for at least weeks, probably months. Simply by taking a fix once a day then turning off that device until its needed again.

I would expect any liveaboard to at least match our fit out, if not exceed it by a comfortable margin.

Not carrying paper charts is a completely different discussion than if you need a sextant on board.

And it has nothing to do with me being perfect it has to do with recognizing the relative likelihood of any one device crashing. Multiplied by the number of devices available. It is inconceivable to me that any modern cruiser with a reasonable amount of electronics onboard could possibly loose every GPS device at once.