SKIPPERS’ TIPS
Finding refuge • Steering cable checks • Seacock safety
I guess my kind of navigation would be described as old hat because it doesn’t depend on, or even involve chart plotters, laptops, software or hardware. I am admittedly, and proudly, old fashioned. I do use a GPS, a hand-held Garmin plugged into the ship’s electric system and I have an AIS transceiver which as a single hander is worth its weight in gold. But I work on paper charts.
When on the ocean I plot one position each day, at noon, but in the all-important log, I note the position every time I have a reason to write or report anything: windshift, sail change for example, thus I always know where I was several hours ago. When in close quarters, near a coast, an island or the English Channel, I may be using a larger scale chart and I may put a position on it as frequently as every 15 minutes, depending on conditions or circumstances. There is not a single electronic device on Nicky which I could not do without if, for instance, a lightning strike wiped it all out. My sextant and tables and a perpetual almanac always travel with me. It’s 22 years since I really worked out sights when I finished my first circumnavigation around the world on Storm Petrel. The sextant was my only means of navigation on that voyage so I think it might take me a day or two to get into it again, but I feel confident that these traditional tools would get me home.