Listen to the old guys (and girls..) and the locals

An old saying, there bold sailors, and there are old sailors, but there are no old bold sailors comes to mind as I read Rod Stephens excellent manuscipt kindly provided by S&S and posted on the Dashews site. The manuscript shows every bit as much commonsense and good seamanship as you would expect from someone with Rods depth of experience, spanning 75 years or so. The lessons contained are hard earned ones, and timeless, and clearly shows why Sparkman and Stephens has such a great reputation.

I am always amazed at the amount of stuff I can learn by listening to experienced older seamen (and seawomen...). Some of what they say might not be in current fashion, or may not conform to the latest scientific ideas, but it often confirms to the hard rules of seamanship and commonsense. And many time quotes from old timers have come back to me in the light of some situation and suddenly make perfect sense. Of course make sure of the credentials of the person you are listening to, there are always plenty of armchair experts...

Also local knowledge is fantastic, I always try to ask the locals about their area, even the newbie boat owner knows much more about the area they sails in than I will. And it is a great way to meet local people. I have had alot of luck talking to the local fishermen, many are often surprised when I ask them about the area (being more used to yachties snubbing them) and their knowledge of the local coast and weather is often incredible. I take a pen and paper for drawing mud maps, and writing stuff down.

Of course I need to be careful of blindly accepting everything at face value, sometimes it is wrong, or more frequently the info is right but I may have interpreted it wrong, but I usually get some really good useful info, and make some friends as well.

Fair winds

Ben

Solar Flares, satellites, and space weather

In my previous post  Sextants and GPS take II I asked the following question

"If you can think of a plausible reason for 4 waterproof, isolated GPS units (including one in a Faraday cage) to simultaneously die, for more than a couple of days, I would very impressed." (note this is a hypothetical situation)

Chris from Brilliant star was good enough to reply and give me heads up on space weather. So now we have at least one possibility, a solar flare, to add to our list of sextant requiring events.

After abit of digging around It seems their is a very remote possibility a large enough solar flare could compromise the GPS, Galileo, GLONASS and Irridium satellites and HF radio for long enough to make carrying a sextant across an ocean a good idea.

From the geology.com website they suggested that normal flares would only reduce the accuracy by 50 meters or so, not a big deal if you are navigating defensively. And they mentioned an 11 year solar flare peak 2013… although some sites are saying it might be this year.

However the chances of an large enough solar event (The 500 year flare.. NOAA ) to wipeout these systems for any significant period seems very remote, And it would also cause chaos ashore, so it falls squarely into my doomsday apocalyptic situation.

But by pure coincidence today has the largest event this solar cycle (11 years or so) according to (see I am turning into a journalist..and covering my ass) these guys .But looking at the chart from the noaa website this will not really effect anything, only being a G1 on the NOAA flare scales for the moment.

But it may be worth looking for an aurora tonight, and think about how having a good idea about space weather could help with the ladies (or whoever you are trying to impress..) I mean how romantic would it be if you plan that evening walk to coincide with a stunning aurora display...

So I will still carry a sextant... And I will also keep an eye on the space weather and also be aware that a strong aurora and poor radio propagation may also indicate reductions in GPS accuracy. But I won't otherwise worry about it, i'll let the NASA guys do that and will continue to focus on keeping the water out and my crew safe.

A Big thanks to Chris onboard Brilliant Star for the information and links.

Cheers

Ben

Sextants and GPS Take II

After all The Iphone stupidity I now have my Big 800w inverter dodgily clipped onto the batteries . Its happily running my computer, But like a vampire it is slurping the life blood from my old pair of geriatric batteries (I can tell it's enjoying the feast because the fan is buzzing away happily). The voltage is rapidly dropping from 12.2v down toward the 12.0v mark... But if I type real fast I may just get this post finished before the interior lights begin to fade.  The joys of being on a mooring.

Now back to the Sextant issue, I now finally have a photo to add.

see I told you it was a Beauty, A Freiburger, never been used. It's a very close relative to the Russian SNO-T sextant (The T stands for tropical apparently). I know this because My friend also lent me a very interesting book called "The Nautical Sextant" that gives in-depth details of the inner workings of every sextant since Sir Isaac Newton first thought of the concept. It will keep me awake again tonight if the batteries hold out long enough...

We discussed my sextant today at work over lunch (I worked as a builders labourer today) and we compared it to a GPS, Most of my fellow builders reckoned they wouldn't cross an ocean without a sextant and almanac, but aside from the rather remote possibility that all the satellites might fall out of the sky.. Or a lightning bolt might fry all 4 GPS units we would have replacing the sextant. No one could come up with a realistic scenario that didn't involve some sort of doomsday apocalyptic situation requiring the sextant.

That being said, I wouldn't cross a reasonable chunk of water without a sextant, maybe for superstitious reasons as much as anything else, I mean it is really tempting mr fate isn't it. There is also more to the sextant than just a backup, somehow carrying one makes you feel more independent, you are not relying on high tech satellites to get you from A to B. You could do it on your own if you wanted to. The satellites become just a convenience, not a necessity. For me at least that is one of the things I like about being at sea, a feeling of self reliance.

The other thing about carrying a sextant is that it links you to the seaman past, to Cook, to Columbus, and even in some ways to the amazing Polynesian navigators, they all had to navigate using the stars, sun and moon. You are a part of a tradition, and it feels right.

The last 1000 NM of the trip from Tasmania to Chile was done using Celestial Navigation only (except Dave who had the odd secret GPS peak for safety). The landfall was the most exciting ever, knowing we had found our position and navigated by the sun and stars. This is something every sailor should feel at least once.

Anyway the vampire has sucked the life blood down to 11.8 volts so if I don't stop soon I will kill the batteries for good. Since you've missed a few photo's I will give you two today, I have finally found a use for Snotty the sextant, It makes a great mouse table, and every thing on a boat needs two uses ...

Cheers

Ben

Ps If you can think of a plausible reason for 4 waterproof, isolated GPS units (including one in a Faraday cage) to simultaneously die, for more than a couple of days, I would very impressed. (note this is a hypothetical situation)

Edit 15/2/11 After discussion with Chris at Brilliant star see here for more details and also the comments on this post. It seems we have our answer, there is a remote possibility a large enough solar flare could compromise the GPS, Galileo, glonass and irridium satellites and radio for long enough to make carrying a sextant across an ocean a good idea?

From the geology.com website they suggested that normal flares would only reduce the accuracy by 50 meters or so, not a big deal if you are navigating defensively. And they mentioned an 11 year solar flare peak 2013…

However the chances of an large enough solar event to wipeout these systems for any significant period seems remote, And it would also cause chaos ashore, so it falls into my doomsday apocalyptic situation. By coincidence today has the largest event this solar cycle according to (see I am turning into a journalist..) these guys

BUT I will still carry a sextant... And I will also keep an eye on the space weather and also be aware that a strong aurora and poor radio propagation may also indicate reductions in gps accuracy.

A Big thanks to Chris onboard Brilliant Star for the Info

for further info see

The 500 year flare.. NOAA
NOAA flare scales

Iphones and Idiots

Had a premature posting problem, so now you know I have an Iphone, and I am also not very good at driving it.. So yes I come clean, I am one of those Latte drinking (actually a flat white) Iphone types.
So today due to being on the boat with a flat computer battery I thought I would try to email in a post about my lovely new sextant. But while halfway through composing my masterpiece of modern literature, my far to fat forefinger acidentally tapped the far to small screen in the spot called send.. so off went my half finished post into the interweb with that stupid iphone signature that I nomally delete..
Anyway the thing doesn't support flash or something so It won't let me go back in and edit the post on my site, hence this longwinded explanation, but anyway you can still answer my question in the last post, what to you think, are sextants like tits on a bull? (ie useless)
While on the subject of phones, for us power starved cruisers this little phone is a marvel, internet at your fingertips, draws next to nothing powerwise. Stores songs and brilliant sailing podcasts from Furledsails.com (you can look them up) And it also stores charts, for $15 (Navionics) I have the whole of Australia stored on It. (it even updates them for me!) Its now a pocketsized chartplotter (It has a built in GPS). Absolutley amazing.... now if only those screens were bigger.

Cheers from Snow Petrel

PS I'm sure the other brand smartphones are just as good, and infact the 3G part of this phone has died so its reception is pretty bad out of town. And in my defense mine is a crappy old 8 meg 3G not the way cooler 3gs or iphone 4, but if anyone from apple is reading this I do accept sponsership...

Sextant and Tits on Bulls

I just bought a Sextant today, I had absolutly no intention of getting one, It just sort of happened.

I brushed the cobwebs off the hatch of Snowpetrel and shook the cockroaches out of the sails, then sailed across to Bruny Island for BBQ. The next day I popped in to see a mate who showed me a sextant he had aquired in a garage sale. I checked it and adjusted out the slight errors, and just held it, unlike my old plastic davis mk 15 this had a "Real" sextant feel, so much like the sextants I learnt to use on the ships. Anyway I bought it.. 500 bucks for a virtually new Freiberger with a lovely wooden case. Why are they so expensive asked karen? 500 bucks I could have bought about 4 GPS units, which would do the same job quicker, more accurately...etc.

So are sextants about as much use as tits on a bull? should they be resigned to antique stores with the walker log?
Sent from my iPhone