Traditional or digital navigation - which is safer?

[slug]

With modern navigation the entire crew has nothing to do..they loaf around, eat, sleep ,get fat and become stupid

With traditional navigation the watchkeeper is always busy, the new watchkeeper is alway# busy

Your entire crew is busy..and they avoid obesity and ignorance

[Cpt Pat]

Originally Posted by slug

With modern navigation the entire crew has nothing to do..they loaf around, eat, sleep ,get fat and become stupid

With traditional navigation the watchkeeper is always busy, the new watchkeeper is alway# busy

Your entire crew is busy..and they avoid obesity and ignorance

You are describing here what I call the difference between 'mariners" and "boat drivers."

Traditional navigation also teaches a crew more about their surroundings than is learned from a digital readout. Pilotage by taking compass bearings and plots on charts makes the voyage more real and memorable. Celestial navigation teaches a bit about astronomy, builds confidence from self-reliance (a core reward of sailing), and makes one more attuned to historical skills.

In the "Old Days" of flying (I'm old enough to know), pilots would plot their flights on a chart with a pencil, mark waypoints, calculate times between waypoints, and take sightings along the way. They had to study the chart and terrain to accomplish this. When GPS came along, pilots put away their paper charts and then we started to see a rash of what's called CFIT accidents: Controlled Flight Into Terrain -- perfectly navigated flight courses that ended in the side of a mountain.

In sailing, we've seen an ultra-experienced crew crash into a reef that could be seen on any world atlas because they misused their chart plotter.

The old skills still have a place, if for no other purpose than a cross-check, and those skills are quickly lost if not practiced.

[Group9]

Here's a boat that was using nothing but electronic charts one night, and had zoomed out too far for detail.

Volvo on the rocks.

[RichMac]

Originally Posted by Group9

Here's a boat that was using nothing but electronic charts one night, and had zoomed out too far for detail.

Volvo on the rocks.

The Vestas crew didn't take the time to zoom in to their position on their plotter. Manually plotting their position on both wide and detail scale paper charts is not a solution for an overworked crew on a very fast yacht.

This accident and others in racing yachts, was caused by a rather old-fashioned approach to navigation, dependant the navigator/tactician at the chart table (who may be asleep). They should have had a chartplotter/radar in front of the helmsman, zoomed about 10 miles. Safety navigation should be done on deck!

[vikingwoman]

Originally Posted by chrisr

if we are going retro, then the HP41 should have a back-up - or folk should learn how to work out celestial sights long hand - like i did. back in the day we use to look very sideways at the various electronic sight calculators...not to be used / trusted

if you are going to get carried away about sextants and paper charts, then you need to go the whole hog. how many boats carry norie's tables these days ?

how many folk here know how to use them ?

cheers,

Hi Cpt Pat,
Yes I use Norie's tables for the ABC formula.
We keep up DR with a ship Walker Log on the stern(with overcast with no sextant use) and a 7# lead line when needed. So with overcast we still have a pretty good idea where we are with Old School.

Al together we have 9 GPS antennas (Garmin, ComNav G2 GPS compass(GPS heading), Iridium Go, ICOM AIS, two USB / two Serial port portables and a Garmin hand held(uses AA batteries) .

For weather we use HO monthly pilot charts, Predict Wind and our HF radios.
For backup to all we carry our National Geographic Atlas

Cpt Pat you sound like a very experienced skipper!

[vikingwoman]

Originally Posted by RichMac

The Vestas crew didn't take the time to zoom in to their position on their plotter. Manually plotting their position on both wide and detail scale paper charts is not a solution for an overworked crew on a very fast yacht.

This accident and others in racing yachts, was caused by a rather old-fashioned approach to navigation, dependant the navigator/tactician at the chart table (who may be asleep). They should have had a chartplotter/radar in front of the helmsman, zoomed about 10 miles. Safety navigation should be done on deck!

Yes nothing replaces keeping watch on deck and a search light at hand.

Charla

[slug]

Originally Posted by Group9

Here's a boat that was using nothing but electronic charts one night, and had zoomed out too far for detail.

Volvo on the rocks.

Same scenario that my friend Bobby lost his boat on Beveridge reef

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/r...niue-bp3f27z6k

[Happ]

Originally Posted by vikingwoman

Yes nothing replaces keeping watch on deck and a search light at hand.

Charla

The reason they don’t have a chart plotter at the helm is the helmsman is focused on making the boat go as fast as possible. He is watching speed, course, polars, wind speed, and wind angle.

It was the navigators error for not looking up the course zoomed in.

You better get used to electronic navigating as paper charts are soon going to be obsolete. Most likely in the next 2 -3 years. This comes from the US Govt.

[slug]

Race boat behave differently ..they are using the chart plotter to track the competition, ponder tactics as well as To navigate

[Q Xopa]

Originally Posted by ramblinrod

Art of Problem Solving 101, Day 1, Lesson 1.

"Any solution mankind can develop to solve a problem, necessarily creates at least one more problem."

There are pros and cons to every possible solution or decision.

Paper charts? They can get wet, catch fire, be blown away, get soiled, be wrong, be non-updated, detract attention from electronic navigation, consume valuable storage space, be difficult to acquire, provide a fixed level of resolution, etc., etc., etc.

Electronic charts? Can fail, be wrong, be non-updated, detract attention from shipboard paper chart navigation, hide information depending on zoom level, etc., etc., etc.

Some say, it is best to use all sources of information to make an informed decision.

What if by attempting to consult all information sources your attention is distracted from other more important ship board duties?

What if there is a conflict; which to use?

What if both or all are wrong?

Anyone who knows anything about boating, should realize that the entire thread is a total waste of server space.

The real answer is, "There is no better solution than what one does that gets them back to port safely"...

…except for those attempting to use a fragile, vulnerable, mobile device, as their primary cockpit navigation instrument. ;-)

Agreed.

I would rather use a fragile accurate instrument than a robust inaccurate one.

But those persisting with inaccurate sources I wish well.

The whole trick with is assessing and recognizing the most relevant and concentrating on that. With periodic cross referencing with other sources.

[Q Xopa]

Originally Posted by ramblinrod

Correct, but long before you stumbled back I could have all the most recent info from multiple more reliable sources off the interwebs from my phone, got her number, and left for the evening. ;-)

I would thankfully take the generous first hand experiance over dubious internet info. Or even better do both. But I guess for those too impatient to listen to both then good luck.

[RaymondR]

Originally Posted by RichMac

The Vestas crew didn't take the time to zoom in to their position on their plotter. Manually plotting their position on both wide and detail scale paper charts is not a solution for an overworked crew on a very fast yacht.

This accident and others in racing yachts, was caused by a rather old-fashioned approach to navigation, dependant the navigator/tactician at the chart table (who may be asleep). They should have had a chartplotter/radar in front of the helmsman, zoomed about 10 miles. Safety navigation should be done on deck!

My little Raymarine A7 has a split screen function whereby on side shows boat position in relation to a large scale, zoomed in chart and the other side boat position in relation to a small scale, zoomed out chart.

Best of both worlds right in front of the helmsman at all time. You can't do that with paper.

[chrisr]

by the way, history proves time and time again that the most unreliable piece of navigation equipment on the boat is...

the nut on the end of the tiller

cheers,

[jtsailjt]

Originally Posted by Group9

Here's a boat that was using nothing but electronic charts one night, and had zoomed out too far for detail.



Volvo on the rocks.

If they’d been relying on paper charts does anyone really think that this same navigator would have had a detailed chart of this tiny reef on board and would have had it out and using it? If you believe that then you must also think that they would have had detailed paper charts of all other possible obstacles anywhere near their probable route AND always had the proper chart out and being actively referred to. If this same navigator, due to fatigue or a false sense of security because they were far from any major land mass, didn’t have the mental discipline to both properly research his planned route in advance and to regularly zoom in and out while underway, why would we expect this paper chart equipped same navigator to have properly researched his planned route in advance and have the correct paper chart out and use at the appropriate time?

This accident wasn’t the fault of digital navigation but rather was the fault of a lack of preparation and laziness on the part of the navigator. Everyone knows that we lose details on charts as we zoom out so this phenomenon is nothing new or mysterious. One advantage to using digital charting displays is that you can easily zoom in and out or have one device zoomed out to see the big picture while using another device zoomed in so you have a close up view of possible nearby obstacles but with paper charts it would be very cumbersome to always keep all this info immediately available to the navigator. The information needed to avoid this reef was literally right at the navigators fingertips but he just chose not to look at it.

[Dsanduril]

The Vestas case, and the discussion here about zooming in, is a solid case of "old think" and not actually learning to use the new tools. Instead trying to use them just like the old tools. With digital charts it would have been easy enough to lay out a guard zone with depth > 100m and range of 20nm to each side and 40nm ahead on the track. The plotter then would have/should have alerted the navigator an hour or so in advance about shallow water in their path.

And similarly when planning the path in advance. Using the new tools as they were designed rather than the way you learned to use the old tools makes a world of difference. Lay out a route and ask the chartplotter to give you CPA for each and every bit of shallow water close to the path.

For Beveridge, since the reef isn't even where the charts show it you could run into it regardless of paper or electronic charts. That's where gathering information from more than one source about your planned route comes into play. There's a host of GPS tracks/chartlets online that give the correct position, along with satellite photos. Again, an electronic device programmed to alert you to any shallow water or land within x miles would have known about the reef even though its position is off by a few miles and should have alerted the navigator - had it properly been told what to do.