The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

The Natural Navigator’s day often starts with a quick check that the sun is rising roughly where it should be – blog readers will be the first to know if it doesn’t! As this picture shows it is not always a chore and the time that our youngest is getting up each morning certainly helps make sure I’m ready.

This will be the last week this year when the sun rises north of east and its change as it heads south each morning (and evening) is at its fastest at this time of year.

There is something surreal, perhaps postmodern?, about blogging about a newspaper that is writing about you. Ian Belcher reviewed my course in the Sunday Times Travel section today, you can read it here, but then you might be reading this because you’ve already read his piece… such are the conundrums of modern life…

Back to reality. I am sometimes struck by how different it can feel walking in different directions along the same beach. Often this is because the wind goes from being on your back to being on your face, but there can be more solid reasons. At Climping where I was this morning the shingle is moved gradually and relentlessly eastwards by the waves. This forces it up against the groynes and means that if you walk east you are faced by gentle hills and sharp drops down, but when you turn around you walk down…

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Last night I spent a few minutes re-reading a couple of passages from Barry Cunliffe’s book about Pytheas the Greek. About 2300 years ago Pytheas went seriously far north for a Mediterranean, but the debate still rages about how far he went. Some of it seems to revolve around an expression about there being enough light to ‘pick the lice from your shirt’ at midnight. Now that’s what I call natural.

This is a picture I took about half an hour ago and it is one of those that might be dismissed by those not trained in the dark arts as a ‘typical English country scene’. With closer inspection it yields navigational fruit aplenty.

The foreground shadow confirms that the sun is no longer visible from this viewpoint, but the direction of the early evening sun is easy to detect from the long shadows in the middle ground. We are therefore looking south.

The smoke from the two fires reveals that the wind is light and variable. In the space of little more than a hundred metres it goes from next to nothing to a light north-easterly breeze.

In the top left of the picture, just above the tree line the south coast sea can just be seen. It is running from left to right, or an east-west line, which…

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We spent some fun family time by the river Thames yesterday.We were in suburbia at Datchet, near Windsor. The recent heavy rains did mean that the water was fast running, but it was not a scene of fear and danger, more the scene of an enormous barbecue. Even so, I don’t think I can spend time near a river without recalling the extraordinary navigator, Harold Gatty, and the line:

‘In nine cases out of ten rivers will lead, if not home, at least to somebody else’s home.‘

The Natural Navigator E-brochure can now be downloaded from here or the links page.

Navigation may fill my working hours, but even I couldn’t pretend that it is a high profile topic. Last week however a story about cows pointing north and south started appearing everywhere, there is a good summary on the BBC website.
On Saturday the Times newspaper ran a main news story and editorial piece describing how GPS navigators are not getting the full experience and are being denied the benefit of the rich detail of traditional maps. They put it well, ‘Turn left on to the A303 for Andover, ignoring the ancient stones: those without a map may not know they are passing Stonehenge.’
Perhaps this mini-surge of interest is why they were kind enough to run a snippet about my courses too.

Bit of an early start this morning for a busy day in London, but there was consolation in a constellation. Forgive me.

I saw Orion for the first time in months and Sirius was just visible above the dawn sun. It gave me a warm fuzzy feeling even though I was shivering in bare feet on cold stone. There were plenty of times mid-Atlantic when the boat was rocking in the big swell and Orion was the friend I used to steady my tired eyes on the night sky. Welcome back, hunter.