Where have our navigation skills gone?
I was astonished reading a letter in 48 North from a cruiser in the San Juans who was happy that taking five minutes to confirm his position was fast enough, that he wasn’t expected to have to do it in 3 seconds. Rich's rule was for his kids, when they came up from below, not the captain driving his boat around the San Juans. And I was shocked that driving around with his family on board he didn't know if the pass he was lined up for was Peavine Pass or Obstruction Pass! When he said he was so pleased that a check on his iPhone cleared it up for him I just shook my head.
Do we actually think this is acceptable?
OK, I get it, we shouldn’t set too high a standard for navigation competence; it might discourage boaters and Lord knows we need to do everything we can to get more people to buy boats and get out on the water. But honestly, going out to sea, even in the San Juans, is playing for keeps. It’s not a carefree lark.
If you are driving a boat you should know your position at all times. Before we had chart plotters I used to steer with a folded chart on my knees and I kept my fingertip on my assumed position. I taught my kids how to do this, and my Explorer Scout students. We took bearings and plotted lines on paper. We followed a compass course. We knew dead reckoning. We could set out from Point Wilson and hit Cattle Pass in the fog. We could navigate through the Canadian Gulf Islands at night without GPS or Loran. If 15 year old boys and girls could do this can’t anyone?
Now we have GPS. That’s good. We have chart plotters. That’s also good. It is much easier now. But you have to use these tools and you have to take navigation seriously. Using a phone with Navionics on it is not serious navigation; it’s hardly better than just driving around navigating by eyeball and simply trying not to run into any land you see sticking up. It’s like using a toy as a navigation source and you are just assuming that everything will turn out all right, that nothing will go wrong or could go wrong. That is not necessarily true; it is dangerous and certainly, in a Coast Guard inquiry, if it ever came to that, it could be viewed as reckless. As journalists and editors in the sailing media we should not approve of this carefree approach.
What is wrong with using a phone or even a small tablet as your main navigation source? The screens are too small, they are barely visible in daylight, and the charts are often poor quality and incomplete. It is too easy to miss a rock which might just be one small asterisk on a 2x5 screen. For reasons of battery conservation people don’t maintain even that limited view. They are driving along, the phone is off or down below and the application is not up and it takes a while to get it going and get a position update and then figure out what they are looking at. Meanwhile they are unclear about their position or the nearby dangers.
We’ve seen it happen too often: a boater drives his sailboat onto a reef which is clearly marked, but when zoomed out, on his small screen, he didn’t notice it (and that’s when he was paying attention). Often they are not paying attention. For example an Alaska marine pilot, driving his own 43’ Westsail in Mexico, crashed directly into a rock doing massive damage to his boat. How was he navigating? He was quoted as saying the rocks did not show up on Navionics. Presumably he was using a tablet or ipad or maybe a Navionics chart plotter. However, there are excellent charts in the Mexico guide books which clearly show not only the rock he hit but several others in the area and we have to assume he didn’t have one of those charts in front of him. Further it is probable that the Navionics chart did not give him much reason to think that he was in a dangerous shallow area where rocks might be present. From an “eyeball navigation” perspective it must have looked OK; the land was a long way off. Obviously, since he is a professional pilot, he had the skills and competence to do better than that. What is left is carelessness and poor choice of tools.
We all need to be good navigators, and with the tools available now days it should be easy, if only we took a modicum of care. 48 North should encourage that.
Fred Roswold, SV Wings, La Cruz Mexico
Do we actually think this is acceptable?
OK, I get it, we shouldn’t set too high a standard for navigation competence; it might discourage boaters and Lord knows we need to do everything we can to get more people to buy boats and get out on the water. But honestly, going out to sea, even in the San Juans, is playing for keeps. It’s not a carefree lark.
If you are driving a boat you should know your position at all times. Before we had chart plotters I used to steer with a folded chart on my knees and I kept my fingertip on my assumed position. I taught my kids how to do this, and my Explorer Scout students. We took bearings and plotted lines on paper. We followed a compass course. We knew dead reckoning. We could set out from Point Wilson and hit Cattle Pass in the fog. We could navigate through the Canadian Gulf Islands at night without GPS or Loran. If 15 year old boys and girls could do this can’t anyone?
Now we have GPS. That’s good. We have chart plotters. That’s also good. It is much easier now. But you have to use these tools and you have to take navigation seriously. Using a phone with Navionics on it is not serious navigation; it’s hardly better than just driving around navigating by eyeball and simply trying not to run into any land you see sticking up. It’s like using a toy as a navigation source and you are just assuming that everything will turn out all right, that nothing will go wrong or could go wrong. That is not necessarily true; it is dangerous and certainly, in a Coast Guard inquiry, if it ever came to that, it could be viewed as reckless. As journalists and editors in the sailing media we should not approve of this carefree approach.
What is wrong with using a phone or even a small tablet as your main navigation source? The screens are too small, they are barely visible in daylight, and the charts are often poor quality and incomplete. It is too easy to miss a rock which might just be one small asterisk on a 2x5 screen. For reasons of battery conservation people don’t maintain even that limited view. They are driving along, the phone is off or down below and the application is not up and it takes a while to get it going and get a position update and then figure out what they are looking at. Meanwhile they are unclear about their position or the nearby dangers.
We’ve seen it happen too often: a boater drives his sailboat onto a reef which is clearly marked, but when zoomed out, on his small screen, he didn’t notice it (and that’s when he was paying attention). Often they are not paying attention. For example an Alaska marine pilot, driving his own 43’ Westsail in Mexico, crashed directly into a rock doing massive damage to his boat. How was he navigating? He was quoted as saying the rocks did not show up on Navionics. Presumably he was using a tablet or ipad or maybe a Navionics chart plotter. However, there are excellent charts in the Mexico guide books which clearly show not only the rock he hit but several others in the area and we have to assume he didn’t have one of those charts in front of him. Further it is probable that the Navionics chart did not give him much reason to think that he was in a dangerous shallow area where rocks might be present. From an “eyeball navigation” perspective it must have looked OK; the land was a long way off. Obviously, since he is a professional pilot, he had the skills and competence to do better than that. What is left is carelessness and poor choice of tools.
We all need to be good navigators, and with the tools available now days it should be easy, if only we took a modicum of care. 48 North should encourage that.
Fred Roswold, SV Wings, La Cruz Mexico
posted by wingssail at 11:50 AM
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