At 01:20 PM 9/28/2008, Jake de Villiers wrote:
>Thanks for that Rico, I thought I was the only one who thought that GPS was
>kinda like sucking your thumb.  :-)

GPS -- when it works -- makes marine navigation terrifyingly
easy.  Part of prudence is knowing what you are going to do when the
machine goes wrong.  My ordinary procedure cruising in Maine (wicked
foggy and wicked rocky, noticeable currents) in the GPS era was GPS
backed by LORAN C backed by radar backed by situational awareness and
readiness to shift to dead reckoning and/or bug out into safer waters.

I've done more than one two-week cruise on that island-strewn coast
where we hardly saw land except for the last hundred feet coming up
to a pier.  Doing it without electronic aids takes the unremitting
effort of two people, with a third keeping an eye on the depth
sounder (oops -- electronic), and it's downright scary.  Doing it
with LORAN C or non-SA GPS positions takes a lot of the strain off,
although two weeks of it would usually wake up my ulcer.  Doing it
with your position continuously plotted on a detailed chart using
WAAS-augmented GPS is, as I said, terrifyingly easy.  It's difficult
to keep a proper level of caution.

David
ps -- I've also taken that same boat, with a bunch of Vanagon people
on board, and run it straight on to a rock in broad daylight *that I
was trying to show them and that they were actively looking for* --
turns out the visibility through that plankton-bowl was about six
inches, not the several feet I was expecting.  Boy, did I feel
stoopid, especially when the boat started to sink.  Turns out that
many years before my father had made friends with a rock near
Boothbay Harbor, and the pirates he took it to to repair it had
filled a two-inch depth of Fiberglas with *BONDO* and pasted a single
layer of glass cloth over it.  When I tapped it in the same place,
the Bondo fell out.

--
David Beierl - Providence RI USA -- http://pws.prserv.net/synergy/Vanagon/
'84 Westy "Dutiful Passage," '85 GL "Poor Relation"