How changing habits of navigation affect us

[goboatingnow]

Originally Posted by valhalla360

Tomato/Tomato...they massed huge numbers on the Ukraine border and indicated they were going to upgrade their moves into Ukraine. This was clearly reported and well known. Only a fool didn't see a high likelihood they were going to attack.



Starting a war by attacking an ally...like Russia attacking Ukraine is starting a war with the US?



Shooting down the GPS constellation goes a little beyond causing some grief with our "interests" via 3rd party participants. That's a direct attack that likely would motivate our leaders to move beyond strong language and funding to full on war.



So I'm still back to my original point:



Note to self: Learn celestial navigation before starting a personal war with China or Russia.

No, that’s not it. The mantra is “ destroyers sail into war zones, leisure sailors don’t.

[goboatingnow]

Originally Posted by Shanachie

This debate can be extended to other items in the electronic suites that are standard on sailboats these days.


A wind instrument negates the need for a sailor to read the water, watch the yarn on the shrouds and generally develop skills to read conditions on their own.


Many sailors install beefy autopilots and expect them to steer the boat through difficult conditions, when a good helmsman could take care of the boat much more competently.


Bundle up all of these gizmos and you're operating a computer instead of sailing a boat.


No argument with depth sounders, though. The best invention ever.

Suggesting all this technology is wrong is rather “ tilting at windmills “

Modern APs are arguably better then most average Human helm

Wind instruments calculate better then I do

Chart plotters have way more detailed charts then my paper collection

Radar sees things I never can.


Technology is used …… because it’s dammed useful and has progressed to the point where it’s incredibly able.

So what I sail a computer. I drive a computer. I virtually live in my house , it’s a computer

Big deal. Or should we scrap them new fangled “ electric lights “ and Go back to candles , cause the Russians might invade !!!

This is my point. The solution is to embrace modern technology BUT also to ensure that the users are aware of the downsides particularly the habit of delegating situational awareness to a machine.

[thesaltytar]

This is also assuming conventional warfare causing a satellite blackout.

I tend to believe that conventional warfare isn't in anyone's best economic interest, and this is what we have going for us more than anything else.

Unconventional warfare is harder to predict. If we're going to entertain the possibility of war at all we should entertain the myriad ways one government might want to mess with another's economy without launching bombs.

I'm not saying this is likely, but I could see a scenario in which satellite navigation is compromised by hacking or other means beyond my knowledge that could interfere with transport and commerce.

In this example it would be safe to sail but difficult to navigate.

Or how about another solar flare? It doesn't have to be a Carrington event level CME (coronal mass ejection), just enough to take out orbiting electronics. And the Carrington event was supposed to be a 100 year average event IIRC.

Agreed we will have larger problems to deal with. Once we navigate back to land.

[Bill_Giles]

People will argue on this deep into the night. Stick a big chart on your chart table, mark your position on it every hour with the time and log reading. If it all breaks down you can resume traditional navigation immediately.

[dave777]

Originally Posted by thesaltytar

[snip]


It's a study about the loss of spatial memory as a result of using GPS navigation over time. I read this article in the r/sailing subreddit and thought it should be shared here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/art...6/#!po=82.6923


[snip]


The concerning part to me is that if people are relying on this progress to take the burden of sailing from them, then it's true, it IS mandatory, because we've collectively outsourced our abilities and habits, and this in turn is affecting our ultimate capacities.

Yes indeed. But if you think GPS puts marine navigation in a precarious situation, you must be trembling at the domination of "smart phones" (that name must be a joke) in the lives of citizens purportedly responsible for their Community and government.

[Shanachie]

Originally Posted by goboatingnow

This is my point. The solution is to embrace modern technology BUT also to ensure that the users are aware of the downsides particularly the habit of delegating situational awareness to a machine.

Yet at some point, it's hardly sailing when devices are making all of the decisions and doing all of the work for you.


I've collected sailing books for more than 20 years.


The old books by Bernard Moitessier, Alec Rose, Joshua Slocum and countless others are enchanting tales of sailors overcoming difficult conditions, loneliness, mysterious weather, unknown obstacles and more.


They sailed their boats with their brains and brawn and senses.



The books written these days? More than a few sailors come off as IT people -- writing email to their weather guide, manipulating suites of electronic devices, adjusting sails with electric winches, etc.


Personally, I like the old way of sailing better, although I am thankful that I have a depth sounder and can read my digitized paper charts on a waterproof tablet.


At 68, I still pull up my anchor and chain by hand, even though I could afford a fancy windlass. It gets the blood flowing in the morning.

[hlprmnky]

One thing this conversation brings to mind is a moment in one of Holly Martin’s YouTube videos about solo sailing in the South Pacific with limited gear. She holds her iPad up to the camera on a night passage and points out that her rhumb-line course passes between two atolls that have far less than ten miles of water between them. “Here’s a course that would have been entirely impossible to safely sail before GPS”, she notes.

That said, while I won’t ever willingly be without some kind of GPS system, I also take hand bearings and want to learn and practice celestial nav, not because I’m afraid that my GPS will fail but because being able to determine where I am on the Earth to within a handful of nautical miles by measuring the stars and knowing things is awesome, in the same way that getting myself moving over the water at handful of knots by having a couple big sticks and some fabric and knowing things is awesome.

I’m willing to accept that electronic charts are the Future, but I hope someday we arrive at a more advanced solution for their consumption than a tablet-sized MFD displaying what we definitely hope is all the correct, valid information we need to make decisions. I would love to see something the size of a paper chart, rollable/foldable and waterproof, with color e-ink and controllable backlighting that let you make annotations, take measurements, draw lines of position, compare human-generated, outward-looking reasoning about one’s location and GPS-received, inward-looking information about one’s position without (necessarily) leaving the cockpit.

I don’t think that such a futuristic device would solve for the people who want to pick a waypoint off a menu and let Otto get them there, but I think the solution for those people has to be found within those people themselves, and all the rest of us can do about them is keep a good watch and verify their CPA to us with the Mk. I Eyeball.

[requiem]

On the topic of trusting charts too much, this seems relevant: https://rifeconsultancy.com/news/bul...agtion-charts/

Seems an offshore oil platform was mistakenly left off the chart. There's another case I recall, where the Admiralty chart and the Greek chart disagreed on the location of a rather large rock. Chart errors happen, and if you're lucky it's the sort of error that can by other means.

The 2017 jamming event in the Black Sea is probably well known by now, but there was another jamming event two years before at an unspecified port.

Intermittent loss of signal is always a possibility, and being able to handle it should be one of those things, like diagnosing an engine problem, that sailors should have in their bag of skills. I still consider it a problem that most plotters don't allow the sort of annotations, lines of position, etc. that hlprmnky mentioned just now.

Originally Posted by goboatingnow

There are 4 systems up there we can always use the Russian one !

Eh, if the US considers it necessary to make one go away, I'm guessing the others wouldn't be up for much longer either.

[Adelie]

Originally Posted by goboatingnow

There are 4 systems up there we can always use the Russian one !

Can we?

[wingssail]

Originally Posted by hlprmnky

...I’m willing to accept that electronic charts are the Future, but I hope someday we arrive at a more advanced solution for their consumption than a tablet-sized MFD displaying what we definitely hope is all the correct, valid information we need to make decisions. I would love to see something the size of a paper chart, rollable/foldable and waterproof, with color e-ink and controllable backlighting that let you make annotations, take measurements, draw lines of position, compare human-generated, outward-looking reasoning about one’s location and GPS-received, inward-looking information about one’s position without (necessarily) leaving the cockpit....

I CAN do all of that on my electronic chart already on my 24" HD monitor, but I don't want it in the cockpit. The cockpit is for sailing. Navigation occurs at the nav station.

[RaymondR]

Originally Posted by wingssail

I CAN do all of that on my electronic chart already on my 24" HD monitor, but I don't want it in the cockpit. The cockpit is for sailing. Navigation occurs at the nav station.

I beg to differ.

My biggest scare occurred back in the day when I was using a gps and paper charts at the nav station. I put the boat on autopilot and went below the input waypoints from the chart into the gps to make a route. I made an error with one of the waypoints and spent some time correcting it. As I climbed the companionway steps the hair on the back if my neck stood up and I made a wild dive for the wheel and just managed a crash gybe before I sailed into a cliff. It took two weeks for that damned hair to go back down properly.

Now I sit at the helm, touch the touch pad on my MFD a couple of times for a goto waypoint and press the nav button in the autopilot. The only downside is that I don't get near as much exercise as I used to.

My nav table on the boat I have now has not had a chart on it since I've owned the boat and now serves it's proper function of being somewhere to rest my drink or porridge whilst I use the remote to change the TV channel.

[Bowdrie]

Originally Posted by RaymondR

and now serves it's proper function of being somewhere to rest my drink or porridge whilst I use the remote to change the TV channel.

Porridge?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URqYtwG4AhI

[wingssail]

Originally Posted by RaymondR

I beg to differ.

My biggest scare occurred back in the day when I was using a gps and paper charts at the nav station. I put the boat on autopilot and went below the input waypoints from the chart into the gps to make a route. I made an error with one of the waypoints and spent some time correcting it. As I climbed the companionway steps the hair on the back if my neck stood up and I made a wild dive for the wheel and just managed a crash gybe before I sailed into a cliff. It took two weeks for that damned hair to go back down properly.

Now I sit at the helm, touch the touch pad on my MFD a couple of times for a goto waypoint and press the nav button in the autopilot. The only downside is that I don't get near as much exercise as I used to.

My nav table on the boat I have now has not had a chart on it since I've owned the boat and now serves it's proper function of being somewhere to rest my drink or porridge whilst I use the remote to change the TV channel.

I'm thinking that was bad navigation practice on your part.

• It is sloppy navigation to enter waypoints and create routes at the helm, errors are easy to introduce in those situations.
• Do your route planning before you set out on your passage
• If you need to make a change to your planned route, do it long before you are yards away from a cliff
• Spend very little time below when you are single handing, and if you have crew, split the duties so that one person can stay on watch. If you are single, stay away from cliffs when you need to be below (tack, heave to, or just turn away)
• Keep a display on deck so you can understand where the nearby dangers are.
• Mostly motor boat people sit in their captain's chairs at the helm instead of sailing and looking where they are going.

Professionally sailed yachts and virtually all racing yachts do their navigation below at a quiet, dry, properly equipped, navigation station.

Single handers have many compromises to deal with to have safe passages.

[RaymondR]

I was miles away from the cliff when I went below to enter the waypoints. The problem is that transferring them from position on chart to lat/long scales then to gps via a keyboard provides a lot of opportunities for transcription errors.

I'm a single hander who has done about 40,000 nm of coastal cruising during the past 20 years and my experience acquired judgement is that life's a lot simpler and safer doing all the navigation on a MFD at the helm position.

What I would really like to be able to do is run OpenCPN with Navionics charts on my two 9" Raymarine Axioms at the helm. One can only dream.

[goboatingnow]

Originally Posted by Bill_Giles

People will argue on this deep into the night. Stick a big chart on your chart table, mark your position on it every hour with the time and log reading. If it all breaks down you can resume traditional navigation immediately.

It’s not what the vast majority of people do. That’s the point. We need to train people using the tools they habitually use.

Why would you use paper when you have fully functional better presented electronic charts on board.