Simple piloting suits the style of a 40-year-old woodie and her captain
Issue 33 : Nov/Dec 2003
We travel in a maze of convoluted shorelines, narrow passages invisible until we are right next to them, and points of land that appear out of mist and vanish into mist as we watch. Time and time again I shake my head in admiration for Cook, Vancouver, Baranof, and the others who first mapped all this. Plodding along in their ponderous converted coal carriers and merchant ships, extracting subtle clues from tides and currents the likes of which even they had never seen before, they made endless paper-and-pencil calculations, and they drew their charts as they went. The wonder of it is that, a century later, the very best satellite pictures show that most of the time they were dead accurate.
I have flown over this area a few times and each time marveled at our ability to get around at all. Seen from the wheel of a small boat when it’s all at eye level, it is often impossible to know if that point ahead is the prominent cape I must pass with generous room or if it is just a minor point in the coastline, free of dangers, that I can cut close. Seen for the first time, there is simply no way of knowing whether the island ahead of you is the one you seek or if your snug cove lies on the next close one. Often what looks like one piece of land will separate into multiple pieces as you approach.
We carry somewhere around 80 charts for the roughly 1,200 miles we cover between Puget Sound and the upper regions of southeast Alaska. New charts cost more than $20 each these days, so there is an active market in used ones. Some of ours are 30 years old. While the land itself has not changed, sometimes we don’t find a buoy or marker light where we expect one. Our old charts, while they might horrify more compulsive — and better heeled — cruisers, have never gotten us into trouble, perhaps because they encourage a certain healthy skepticism.
Simple piloting
Knowing where we are is usually a simple matter of looking from chart to land in an “if this is that, and that is this, then we must be here” style of piloting. Every once in a while we’ll need a bit more precision, perhaps to thread our way past a reef. Then I’ll reach for the traditional divider, rules, and other plotting tools that haven’t changed since Cook’s day. After a few minutes you might hear me say something like, “We’ll hold a course of 230 until Skip Rock is abeam, then go to 275 until we clear Bull Point.”
Nothing causes such a deep visceral disquiet in a sailor’s gut, though, than to look around and ask, usually to himself, “Where the heck are we, anyway?” Then I’ll usually grumble, “I wonder if Gypsy is in the mood,” and reach for our little portable GPS satellite navigator. I’ll punch it on and fidget while its tiny circuits and chips align their mysterious auras. (You may sense that I have a deeply ambivalent relationship with Gypsy.) Being the completely antiquated old girl that she is — seven years of age makes her an artifact — this always seems to take an eternity. Sometimes the auras simply will not align, and the screen stays obstinately blank. But usually she will decide to be a good old girl, and I’ll say something like, “Ah, yes, N53.5 by W127.46,” followed — if there happen to be guests aboard — by, “Just as I thought.”
For my wife, Wendy, who needs a bit more reassurance, we also have a radar, new for this trip. At more than $2,000, I drew comparisons to other necessary items like hot water or more Irish whiskey, but Wendy likes it. And it does make us look somehow more modern — an odd concept when you consider that Persistence is 40 years old, made of wood and built to a design that goes back a hundred years. The practical fact is that with our style of “chicken cruising,” we are lots more likely to stay at anchor until the fog lifts or, seeing it coming, turn and flee to a safe nook. After our first full season, we haven’t yet used the radar to actually find our way.
So, on we go, chugging from one bay to another, very occasionally meeting terrible weather or making an open ocean crossing, often planning our passages around tides and current, the most-often-asked question on Persistence remaining, “What day is today, anyway?”
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
