Just back from 5 weeks and almost 900 natical miles sailing inshore and coastal waters in the Baltic Sea and offshore waters, if you can say that you are sailing offshore, when crossing the Kattegat between Denmark and Sweden, including overnight landfalls. Â*All that without GPS.
No intended test, the GPS just did not work when we initially plugged it in. It just was searching the sky for ever, finally telling that the coverage was poor (in fact it showed NO satellite!). So we tried the second GPS, but with the same result.
Well, we found out that it is a failure of the external antenna and as we we do not carry the GPS outside and found it not so thrilling to jury rig the handheld GPS with its own antenna under the spray hood, we put it back in the locker and left it there for the rest of the time and got out the bearing compass, pencil, ruler and all the other traditional navigational gear to work on the paper charts... and enjoyed traditional navigation! (dead reckoning, taking bearings, depths etc...).
It was great! We should do that more often! All Sailors should!
(I hope that there is no coincidence, that I started to read an old book, that was newly issued in 2008: Emergency Navigation by David Burch. I have not yet read it all (too much sailing), but a perfect book to learn to navigate without everything but a wrist watch.)Â*
Uwe
SY Aquaria
 : Germany, Background, Cruising/Sailing the German Bight |
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