The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

There are many things that I am excited about discovering in the Sahara and some of these are what Donald Rumsfeld might have called the ‘known unknowns’. Another thirty degrees of night sky will be offered up, including such important treats as Canopus, the second brightest star in the sky (after Sirius). It is impossible to see under any conditions from Britain.

Although I must not waste the precious liquid, it is also mouth-watering to try to imagine some of the ‘unknown unknowns’. I will be keeping the senses fully alert and hoping to catch the smell of oases on the wind, but perhaps there will be some surprises too. R. A. Bagnold, a desert expert and scientific pioneer, once found a water hole by following the smell of a single camel he picked up from eight miles away. My method of travel makes it very unlikely that I will be…

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During a short outdoor navigation course yesterday, nature once again enjoyed mocking me a little.

While discussing methods of using the wind to navigate, I had explained how wind direction is surprisingly constant over a period of hours and although small shifts are common, large changes are much less so, and complete reversals very rare. The key is understanding that a significant change in wind direction will be caused by a change in the relationship between your location and a nearby weather system, ie. a front moving through. The change in weather is usually gradual enough to foretell of wind shifts, but not always…

Yesterday we witnessed a complete flip, the wind direction shifted almost 180 degrees from south-southwest to north in one hour. This was something that I had just proclaimed to be almost unheard of, unless there was a complete change in weather. The weather had not yet changed, there…

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Picking up on a theme I touched on a few days ago, it is remarkable and delightful how differently we all see the world. Yesterday during a short course in the South Downs, we were sitting on a bench with a great view having a drink of water and a snack. It is a bench and view that I have come to know very well, at least I thought I had.

Scale is such a key to reading the land, the ability and conscious decision to zoom in and out, from miles of landscape one minute to the tiniest patch of lichen the next. Maggie who was sat only two feet from me, spotted something in front of us that I had never noticed before. Her eyes were clearly picking up colours more sensitively than mine yesterday as she had picked out some shades of purple in a distant woodland earlier.…

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I spent this evening studying some well-respected sand dune theory before my upcoming trip to the Libyan Sahara. It had been a long day, with lots of fresh air, and I may have bitten off more than I could chew. Let me share a small excerpt of it with you:

‘Confining ourselves to fully developed turbulent flow throughout the fluid, there remains the question of the small-scale flow over and round the individual grains on the surface. This depends on Reynolds’ Number of the form V*d/v, where d is the mean surface roughness which is of the order of the grain diameter. It has been found that when V*d/v>3.5 the grain behaves as an isolated obstacle in the path of the fluid, and throws off a chain of eddies from its lee face.’

From ‘The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes’ by R.A. Bagnold. 1954.

Great stuff, I’m sure, but enough to…

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On a family visit to Longleat on Monday there was the perfect illustration of a frustrating problem that has confronted me for over a decade.

Sometimes knowing the direction you want to go is not nearly enough.

Direction is the cornerstone of all navigation, not least natural. Natural navigators are sometimes forced towards a principle of ‘if we head towards our destination we will get there, eventually’.The problem lies in that sometimes even if we know the way we want to head it is not possible to go that way and we are forced to make difficult choices and compromises.

The Longleat maze is an extreme analogy of the challenge. Standing on one of the wooden bridges that give a limited overview of the maze structure it was quite easy to see the direction of our goal. The wooden fort in the centre of the maze was southwest of us, but this knowledge…

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The Gooley family spent Sunday afternoon mucking about at Stonehenge and then heating baked beans and pasta on the VW campervan stove. A modern, but not very, ceremony that paid homage to some ancient rituals.

I was perhaps the only tourist walking around the perimeter who was taking note of the varying moss and lichen growth as I worked my way round the stones from the north side through west, south, east and back. It wasn’t the subtle shifts in colour that held my thoughts though.

There is surprisingly little that is properly understood about Stonehenge, but some solid deductions are possible. The alignment of the stones confirms a true understanding of solstices by its architects. It is tempting to think that solstices were a widely understood phenomenon even in ancient times and not give this aspect much more thought, but that would be to do a disservice to the Stonehenge people.…

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Off to Stonehenge for the day in a VW Campervan. I know.

There is one modern view that holds man as master of the natural world, shaping it to meet his needs and desires. There is a conflicting view that we are but specks on the backs of tortoises on the backs of elephants, balanced precariously on floating logs, vulnerable to the slightest quiver of nature’s balance. Somewhere at the heart of this debate is the question of whether the human being understands its position in the natural world and is a sensible custodian of its own fortune.

There is much in Peruvian history, natural and political, for both sides to leap on and scrap ferociously with. It might be diverting, if not entertaining, to take a look at a very small slice of it.

Trade winds carry warm water west away from the Peruvian coast and a Humboldt current brings cold nutrient-rich water flowing in to replace it. The birds like this water…

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I ran a small private course yesterday and enjoyed a wonderfully ironic moment. It was almost embarrassing.

The first half of the day was spent indoors studying the theory, looking at photographs and playing with celestial models. One of the points I am always keen to make is about the relationship between the uses of our senses and wayfinding. Sight is so often under-rated because its use is so immediately obvious, but we rarely acknowledge how much detail is allowed to escape. For example, we have evolved to identify things by shape much more readily than by colour or shade. Our brains tend to identify an object as a tree, ie. not a threat, and then move on to processing other information without noticing the subtle differences in shades of the leaves at all. Sometimes it pays to rein it in, to force it to focus and to analyse some of…

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My wife agreed to drop me in a strange part of the South Downs this morning as part of a long-winded school run. The Land Rover was happy again, away from the ice. It will devour giant puddles all day long with a smile.