The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

At the moment, I’m trying to get the word out to the orienteering community about the joys of natural navigation.

I’m also panning for nuggets of shiny information, any techniques that might be being used that I have not come across. So, if you know any orienteering navigators out there please ask them to get in touch.

Thanks!

T

Thanks to everyone who came to hear my talks and buy the book at the Outdoors Show yesterday. I will be giving the talks again today and on Sunday at the following times on the stage at the Wilderness Camp:

1.15: The Wonderful World of Natural Navigation. A quick peek at a couple of the journeys that led to my passion for the subject, including the transatlantics, and then a whirlwind tour of lots of techniques that you can use yourself.

4.00:  Navigating Using the Night Sky. The ways we can use the stars, moon and planets to find our way. Introducing the ‘celestial sphere’, which despite its name is a great way to simplify the night sky.

I will be signing copies afterwards so bring yours along if you already have one or hopefully there will be some left to buy later at the show.

Hope you can make…

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A really great crowd came to my talk at the Oxford Literary Festival yesterday. The room was packed, which is always exciting. It did mean that the temperature levels rose as oxygen levels fell, but enthusiasm for the subject never waned. In this sense the admirable audience took the sun as their model, not the moon. Thank you to everyone who came to the talk and for making it one of those days that gives a writer a warm feeling, one that lasts outside the room, in the cool fresh air.

Book update… Amazon and Waterstones online are now restocked. The second reprint should be ready by next week, so any supply problems should start to ease then.

Sorry if you are trying to buy a copy of ‘The Natural Navigator’ – Amazon have sold out again!

After selling out, restocking and two reprints in the past three weeks, the book is now temporarily out of stock again on Amazon. Another massive thanks to everyone who has bought a copy so far.

You can still order it from Amazon. Or there are still quite a few bookshops that have a copy (worth phoning before), or online while stocks last at these places:

The Book Depository

Waterstones

Foyles

The photo above is of the hill to the east of my home, taken very early this morning. This is the first time this year that the morning light has appeared from the north of the hill. By June the sun will have moved all the way up to northeast.

There is a really good attempt to give a flavour of the whole subject of natural navigation in an article in the Independent today by Tim Walker. Tim came for a walk in London to sample natural navigation urban-style.

Anyway, flower pot time. Take a look at this photo that I took yesterday just before lunch. Note the wet ground in the shade and how the shadow of the pot has moved ‘up’ leaving a wet area in its wake. The shadow is moving west to east, away from the camera. As it is close to the middle of the day, the sun is close to south and to the right of the picture. The shadow of the young tree is a near perfect north-south line.

There is also a shadow in the pot itself, on the right, southern side. This shade is allowing one side to stay moist…

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A beautiful six day old moon is hanging high in the sky at the moment. There are some weird, wonderful and slightly complex ways of using it to find direction. There is also a really easy one that takes less than five seconds. The method is on page 147 of the book, with an illustration on page 148.

Are those cries of, ‘You tease!’, I hear echoing around the blogosphere?

I’ve just found out that the May 2009 BBC Countryfile episode where I took Jules Hudson for a taste of natural navigation in the South Downs has been uploaded to YouTube.

Happy Spring Equinox!

My plans this morning, as announced in the Telegraph, were to head to the top of a hill and catch the sun rising due east. Sadly, the air is cooler than its dewpoint… the humidity is greater than 100%… there is a low level of nimbostratus… however you want to put it: the weather is not very good and the visibility is terrible.

Had I been able to see the sun it would have risen due east. The vernal and autumnal equinoxes being the only two days of the year when the sun rises due east.

Something that you cannot notice on any individual day, but only by studying the sun’s rising position over the course of a year from the same location, is that its rising and setting positions are changing by more at this time of year than at any other time. Near the…

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Welcome Radio 4 listeners! You have found your way to the home of natural navigation on the Internet. (A podcast of my walk with Evan Davies for the Today programme can be found here. The short article that I wrote to go with the interview and the video that accompanied the broadcast can be found here.)

The book reviews are starting to come in:

‘In a sat-nav dominated world, where GPS and a host of other acronyms designed to get us from A to B have overtaken paper maps, it is refreshing to meet someone who understands technology, but prefers to find his way by practising the rare and ancient art of using nature’s signposts, from puddle patterns to shadow lenghths… I’m hooked. Back at the beech, I make a mental note of emerging bluebell patches, forming an internal map that I’ll use to find my way…

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After selling out in under 48 hours on Amazon and elsewhere, the book has been reprinted and is now available again at most shops – online or off. Thank you to all who have bought the book so far; after the thousands of hours that have gone into the research, writing, editing, illustrations, production and launch, it is wonderful to know that it is being read. Thanks for the nice feedback too, a recent favourite:

“I recently bought a copy of your book and loved it – quite remarkable! My brother has stolen it from me yesterday – he’s a Qantas Pilot so I’m guessing it’s somewhere over the Pacific at the moment.”

A couple of days ago Sir Ranulph Fiennes – no stranger to fresh air projects! – described the The Natural Navigator as:

“The perfect book for getting you started on your own adventure.”

It is…

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