The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

Welcome to the Natural Navigator

Although I occasionally get labelled as Mr. Anti-anything-modern-and-would-rather-eat-a-pair-of-hemp-pants-than-use-a-GPS*, the truth is different. I do use a GPS, quite regularly in fact and always take one on serious walks, even if I don’t use it. I was able to use it to test natural navigation skills in the Libyan Sahara recently.

Soon I am hoping to use technology to solve a riddle that is proving elusive to both natural observation and thought. That is the shape of the a shadow stick’s arc as it goes from one side of an equinox to another. It is too subtle for me to gauge from stick and chalk efforts in my back garden. The answer is not in any of the many books and articles that I have on astronomy, ancient or modern. I have put this little riddle to dozens of good minds over recent months, some of them professional scientists, and no-one…

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A lateral mind is needed in this business. It can be great fun, searching for connections between things that would never before have seem related. I have been studying ancient geography this morning, as ever on the hunt for clues to methods used by our ancestors.

Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian, refers to a crocodile that allows a bird to pick meat from its teeth. Could this be the inspiration behind the popular, and well-thumbed-in-our-household, children’s book, The Selfish Crocodile, by Faustin Charles?

I don’t want to spoil the tale for anyone who has yet to read it, but suffice to say that a small creature does some good crocodile dental work.

News that the European Space Agency’s latest venture to study gravity was successfully underway reached me as I was reading about a related topic today.

According to the book, Beyond the Moon by James Greig McCully, the extra mass and consequently gravitational force at the equator caused by the earth’s spin is near perfectly counteracted in weight terms by the extra centrifugal effect of spinning faster there than at higher latitudes. Nearly perfectly, but not quite.

What does this mean? Well the counteracting effects leave a net result of a person feeling ever so slightly less heavy at the equator than at the poles, less than one fifth of one percent so not a great deal. Still, slightly odd to think that we become heavier by walking north in the northern hemisphere and vice versa. Worth bearing in mind if you’re a boxer or fatfighter at a crucial weigh-in,…

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If the plan survives contact with the enemy, then our younger son goes to bed at the same time, 7pm, every night. Part of his bedtime routine, after bath, milk and a story is for him to run up to one of us and demand to see the Moon. Unfortunately we are not able to oblige with a view of the Moon every evening, much in the same way that we cannot find enough cake in the universe to satisfy his desires. Our alternative tactic to cake is usually a sweet fruit snack, cheese, raisins etc. The alternative for the Moon, on a clear night will be a bright star.

Sirius is very visible on clear nights at this time to the south. Unfortunately last night it was obscured by a tree branch. Nature is obliging enough to make the stars rise 4 minutes earlier each evening and so…

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And the award goes to…

“Thank you for a wonderful day, yesterday. The course and surroundings were inspiring. This morning I went for a walk from the house, heading inland and then onto the cliffs along a frequent route. Today was like a new experience with each plant / view being analysed. The walk did take twice as long as usual which my wife does not thank you for.”

The Gooleys were out on the water this morning on our Contessa 32, Golden Eye. It was one of those spring days that exceeded expectations. It felt like a summer holiday as we moored back up at Chichester Marina and walked to the Spinnaker Cafe for lunch. The beach feeling was completed when my younger son picked up a fistful of sand from the cafe sandpit and, before I could intervene, sprinkled it all over a plate of scampi.

The photo is of a fellow Contessa 32 anchored off the beach at East Head, enjoying the rays.

One of the things that I love about running my courses is that I’m guaranteed to learn something too, but because of the diverse backgrounds of those that attend I can never guess what area it will be in. Over the past few courses I have learnt something about drumlins, Foucault’s pendulum, moles and sewage smells. This is a subject that is wonderfully difficult to pigeonhole, which reminds me…

The Geographical magazine asked me today whether I considered myself a geographer.

I gave the following, slightly long-winded answer:

‘Am I a geographer? Good question, but no short answer I’m afraid. My niche has a lot of geography in it, but is probably not part of what the academic geographical world would consider its domain. Natural navigation sits astride many fields including geography, meteorology, natural science and astronomy, to name a few.

However, my recent trip to Libya…

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What sort of person comes on your courses?

All sorts! Those who enjoy fresh air and have an open mind. So far there have been artists, soldiers, writers, walkers, Navy officers, drainage engineers, lawyers, physicists, ecologists, accountants, marketing people, IT people, financiers, an RAF Navigator, fathers, mothers, daughters, sons, farmers, pilots, actors, sailors, builders, midwives… No astronauts yet, but it’s still early days.

I find myself drawn into discussions about technology on more days than not. On the navigation front it is all quite comfortable, but when it comes to the social networking thing it’s another matter, Web 2.0 it might be called, I really don’t know.

I do Twitter occasionally, because I’ve been told to by my web design company, but I’ll confess that the concept still slightly escapes me. Last week a friend that I had not seen since university got in touch to tell me what another mutual friend who he had not seen for ten years, but I had met recently, was doing from his Linked-In page. He seemed to know him better than I do. Before I start to sound too much like an incontinent old dribbler I should get to the point and mention that I’ve just done an interview for the lovely crowd at

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A lot of people are aware that TV satellite dishes can be used to find direction. There is a popular belief that in the UK that the dishes point south, which fairly accurate, it is actually normally south-southeast. The areas of Libya that I have just returned from are a few degrees north of the Tropic of Cancer and so some south in the dishes made sense, although I did note that there they tended towards south-southwest.