John Stone wrote:
Jim, you are suggesting a rational angle to something not really rational to begin with (and from someone who lamented when I installed an engine!! LOL). That's not what this is about. Sailing offshore especially singlehanded (not my true preference by the way) is to the left on the rational scale. So the whole discussion is about degrees of what is or is not rational and or reasonable on a sliding scale of extreme caution on the right side to insanely reckless on the left side. On the extreme right you have a guy that won't even go sailing because sailboats are tippy. On the extreme left you have a guy that sails across the Atlantic on a boat made of seal skins sewn over a fame lashed together with leather thongs and tree vines and navigating with a lodestone. We are all on the scale somewhere. There is no right or wrong (though many people take exception to that position). We each sail for different reasons. Some for internal personally driven reasons while others (probably a pretty small group) for externally driven (maybe a stunt) reasons. I am willing to bet you are in a pretty small select category sailing a keel boat in Maine without an engine. Wouldn't it be safer and more prudent to have it aboard and not use it? Of course. But that's not what it's about for you.
I see sailing without an engine, in your boat or my boat, to the left of not have GPS (if one is competent with CN and I am not at this point) on that risk scale.
But the whole discussion about navigation is academic since I have GPS in my phone (pretty much all phones have a GPS these days), on an iPad, in a Garmin, on the AIS. There is essentially no escaping it. You would have to take all that stuff off the boat. I think the Golden Globe requires competitors to have a satellite comm device but it's in a sealed box that if opened disqualifies the participant with a few exceptions. There are probably all kinds of liability issues there.
One can always find reasons to add more technology if it's always framed as a safety issue. I refuse to be boxed in by the boating industrial complex as I see risk as a personal decision.
My point in all this is if you really want to experience non GPS sailing authentically you can't have it aboard. Such action positions the risk at place X on that previously mentioned scale. If you have that stuff available, even sealed, you are now to the right of X. If you have that technology open and running but not actively using it you're farther to the right of X. And how one feels about that is a personal decision.
Essentially my only concern about these kinds of decisions and discussions is the "why" behind them. If it's for internal personal reasons, I get it. If it's for external publicity reasons then that's something different. I'm not in to that, though I watched an interesting documentary where a team attempted to recreate Shackleton's epic voyage from Elephant Island to S Georgia in a converted life boat salvaged from the
Endurance. That seemed like a reasonable attempt to see what it was like. Though they had radios, gps, goretex, and a safety boat. So while they recreated part of it they could not recreate the psychological experience that Shackleton and his men endured and why would they because we all know Shackleton would have taken his Garmin if he had one. Hahaha.
I shot Sirius last night. There were dark clouds behind the horizon line and I had to wait another 20 min to be able to pull it down past Water Island. So the horizon was not great as it was almost full dark. I still had to shoot between moored boats as well. Downwind at sea I might have been able to pull it off but up wind or reaching...forget it.
I ripped through the math in 10 min but when I went to HO 249 reduction tables I used the wrong declination page. I used Latitude Same as Declination (I am in north and celestial body is in north (like the sun)) when I should have used the contrary page because I am in north latitude but Sirius is in south declination. The nice thing is it's immediately obvious that you made a mistake because the corrected sight is more than 50 min off the observed sight. But it took me another 45 min of backtracking every step multiple times before I figured out what I did wrong. Gah!
I wonder if anyone else is interested in these esoteric discussions we are having. They would be fun at the bar though probably more animated.
Ugly wx forecasted for the coming weekend.
I find it interesting that you consider engineless sailing more adventurous than GPS-less sailing. I think it's the other way around for me, at least most of the time. If you know exactly where you are you can get away with a whole lot more stuff than if you only
roughly know where you are. Here are a couple of tight maneuvers that I have no problem doing without an engine, but that would scare the bejeebers out of me to try without a GPS. The first is in Little Thorofare, by North Haven, Maine. Here's my track:
2021-06-16 Little Thorofare.jpg
Notice that 2' shoal. How close do you have to get to shore to avoid it? By eyeball that's a really tough call. With GPS (and prior verification that the 2' shoal is where it is supposed to be) it's no biggie under sail, as long as the sculling oar is handy.
The second is by Sheep Island, also near North Haven:
2021-07-03 Sheep Island.jpg
Tacking around the ledges, rocks, and the 3' shoal would be dicey work without a GPS.
On the other hand, there's one place I know where GPS does absolutely no good, but an engine is really helpful. That's the entrance to The Basin on Vinalhaven Island, Maine, where there are just a few feet on either side of the boat between a rock ledge and the main island, and where for all but 20 minutes per day it is either too shallow to pass or the current runs swiftly enough to wreck a boat.
2020-08-20 The Basin.jpg
Crazily enough, it is my ambition to one day transit that cut without an engine. If I can manage that Arietta would probably be the first engineless sailing vessel to negotiate that cut in over a century.
Part of me says that, with the exception of a few folks like the Pardeys, almost none of the sailors whose accomplishments we admire (from "old school" navigators like Magellan, Drake, Cook, Bligh or Shackleton, to more modern people like Matt Rutherford, Randall Reeves, and Ryan Finn) would have chosen to forego any new technology that helped achieve the goals of the expedition, so why should I do that? It also happens to be the mindset some of the lobster fishermen in Maine I have met who think all sailors are crazy. No rational person would be on the water in a sailboat when a powerboat can do the job so much better. Likewise with GPS vs celestial, it is crazy to use celestial except as a backup for when some sinister super-villain brings the entire GPS satellite constellation to its knees. The other part of me says that it is just so much more satisfying to do it the hard way, and that it is worth taking pride in my sailing accomplishments without an engine, and likewise if you choose to navigate without using a GPS. I guess the lobstermen are right, and all of us sailors are at least a little bit crazy.
Onto the celestial...those same name/different name tables can be easy to mix up. When you are navigating for real and wind up doing the same sights from the same tables over and over again with only minor differences as you change position or as the celestial body moves, just stick a few Post-It Notes on the pages for the tables you frequently use and write the celestial body name on the note to make it easy to go back to the right part of the book again. I look forward to following your progress!
Yep, you're right, good topics for conversation over a few beers. Until such a time, the board will have to suffice.
Smooth sailing,
Jim
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