The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

The title of this post is not, for once at least, a reference to my style of blog-writing, but to the BBC Radio 4 program hosted by Clare Balding.

On Wednesday night I joined Clare and the Ramblings team for a walk on the South Downs Way; we headed west from Amberley, finishing at the Bignor Hill car park. We were treated to stars, planets and a full moon. I’ll let you know when it is airing, but should be sometime in June.

I felt hugely privileged and honoured throughout the walk, as early on Clare revealed that she has been embarking on walks for the Ramblings series for nearly 10 years, but this was the first ever night walk.

Did you know that in the UK a full moon rises close to southeast in summer and nearer to northeast in winter? (If you find viewing the full moon…

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I woke very early this morning and felt restless so headed into the Downs for a walk. I listened to the Shipping Forecast in the car on the way, feeling instantly integrated into the fragmented dawn community of fishermen and farmers.

There were some spectacular sights as the sun rose and fought back the mist over the Arun Valley. The views were filled with colour experiments too as the pinks and oranges of the sky rose in a crescendo that battled with the whites and greens closer to the ground. In the end the orange clashed too grossly with the yellows of a field of rapeseed and I had to look away.

Yesterday afternoon I received the following email from a young navigator called Luke Hardy:

This Saturday, just gone, myself and two friends went on our local walking competition – the Charnwood Hike.  The aim is to complete…

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I went for a stroll this morning in a pair of Ugg boots. My eyes were drawn up to where the taller trees’ branches were getting lost in the mist, but then a strange sensation in my feet pulled my eyes down again. The ground was strewn with the discarded purple flowers of the ash trees above, each step was being cushioned by the soft bounce of the dead flowers.

The Outdoor Swimming Society have chosen The Natural Navigator as their book of the month. Thank you OSS!

After a family holiday in the Emirate of Ajman, near Dubai, our return to the UK was, like so many others, held up by the volcanic ash. It has been a perplexing time and a challenging period for everyone who has been travelling or who works in travel.

Inbetween calls to London, I escaped the hotel and headed briefly into the desert to find a Bedouin Sheikh to interview. It was a fortuitous encounter with a fascinating and extremely knowledgable eighty year old and I will write it up from my notes and publish it on the site soon, but in the meantime my interpreter can be seen in this photo heading back towards the Toyota Landcruiser, after asking a Bedouin farmer where to find the Sheikh.

Last night I managed to take 46 photographs in a desperate bid to catch the elusive, and some like to say mythical, ‘green flash’ at the moment of sunset. The green flash is an optical phenomenon caused mainly by blue/green light bending more than the reds/yellows. There is a fuller description of its causes on Wikipedia.

I did not manage to see or capture the flash, but peering out across the Persian Gulf at the anchored ships, feeling the cool westerlies coming off its waters as the heat of the day faded… is not a bad way to endure a fruitless search.

It is often very difficult to see the sun clearly at the moment of sunset due to clouds or haze, but there are times when, if the sky is clear, the air is dry enough and the horizon is an ocean, then the sun can be seen…

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I quickly reached for my camera when I saw these objects in the sky. The picture was taken without a tripod and so they are a little blurred, but it is still just possible to make out the lights. A few seconds later the sky looked completely different and this could lead to suspicions that something unusual was going on, perhaps even stir suspicions of UFOs. The true explanation is very straightforward.

The bright light to the left of the picture is an aircraft turning towards the camera with its landing lights on. The bright light near the top of the picture is Venus. There is a fainter light, barely perceptible amongst the edges of the top part of the cloud and this is Mercury. A few seconds later the aircraft had turned fully and effectively disappeared from view and Mercury had disappeared behind a cloud making the sky appear…

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For the past few evenings I have been heading out into the Downs to find a good spot to keep watch out to the west. A sunset is always worth a walk, but there is rarer game worth hunting for in the skies at the moment. Unfortunately the clouds came in at the last minute last night and obscured Venus and Mercury again.

Such a shame, it would have been an unusually good opportunity to catch them going to bed together. Fear not, I have a near foolproof plan for spotting them and shall report back with my results. If, over the next few days, you do catch a clear sky and setting sun, hold tight and wait for the two bright beacons that will follow the sun down.

There was a review of the book in Easter’s Sunday Telegraph.

I don’t know what you’re going through in your part of the world, but here in southern England there have been all the symptoms of a passing cold front recently. It has turned colder and there have been extreme changes of weather, with stormy downpours. The sun is out at this second, but the grass is poking up through a mat of hailstones.

I took this photo of an isolated cumulonimbus cloud and it shows one of the culprits in action. Spied on a horizon, this is exactly the sort of cloud that  should send a walker, sailor or pilot rummaging around in a bag for a Plan B!

There is a review of the book in the Irish Times this morning. If I’m honest it is the sort of review that, from an author’s perspective, a cold front can do little to dampen. Did they know that…

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