The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

A tiny piece about ‘Les Ecrehous’ islands, that I had written for the Guardian ages ago, featured in it last Saturday. Here it is:

This year I was lucky enough to spend some time on a place called Les Écréhous. It is a place you spend time on, not in. Five miles northeast of Jersey, these three tiny islands stand precariously above the water at high tide, surrounded by rocks that have claimed countless lives in the past. When the tide recedes the dots in the sea join up, forming the most rugged landscape of sharp dark shapes, broken only by a few curves of sand. At low tide it is possible to walk for half an hour over land that spends most of its time deep underwater.
It is the ultimate coastal experience, filled with rich evidence of life – we found baby cuttlefish squirting ink in the rock pools –…

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First thing this morning our bathroom was bright with diffused light from the blinds that had been filled with moonlight from the west. I put on a thick jacket and pair of Ugg boots and wandered outside. Looking up I was spoilt. The moon was indeed throwing her weight around and this can sometimes make for imperfect stargazing, but the cold air was clear enough that between the first glow of dawn in the east and the moon’s light in the west there were riches to choose from. Gemini, Leo and Virgo were high in the sky. The dark spaces between them were punctured with Saturn and the reddish Mars. In the east another tinge of red was clear in the form of Arcturus. (It was less than two months ago that I was wondering at Arcturus and Bootes in the western evening sky.) Low in the southern sky were Corvus,…

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The northerly winds were carrying high cirrus and contrails down towards the coast this morning. They have brought colder air, as forecast yesterday. This gave us our first frost of the season. The feel and even the sounds of the grass underfoot have a relationship with the direction the air is moving.

I had hoped to sail to the Isle of Wight on Saturday with some old friends. We slipped Chichester marina at eight in the morning in my Contessa 32, fully aware that the forecast was a bit spicy. The sense of foreboding increased slightly when the Chichester marina lock-keeper called down to me, ‘Have you seen the forecast?’ I said ‘Yes. Force 6 gusting 9.’ He replied, ‘OK, well when the lock gates open you will need to gun the engine full throttle and hold your line otherwise you will be blown straight onto the piles.’ I thanked him and felt a small surge of adrenaline.

We made our way out into the harbour and at times it was hard to hear each other speaking as the wind whistled past our ears. After an hour I decided that we ought to swallow our pride and return to the marina and postpone the…

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Russ Altendorff came on a course in the hills yesterday. He is a keen sailor, electronics guru and author of a popular blog on the more technological side of marine navigation. During our afternoon we locked horns with topics that ranged from the desert to the ocean and back to a southern England that was experiencing hail, horizontal rain and even the odd sunbeam. We also discussed ‘confirmation bias‘, or the tendency to make your observations fit your preferred hypothesis. Natural navigation is particularly susceptible to this, nature is rarely absolute and is so often open to interpretation. On a cold wet day it is even more likely that you are going to want the evidence to fit your theories.

At the end of the afternoon the sun was down, the moon and Jupiter were high in the southern sky, and it was time for Russ to take on a challenge.…

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I went for a short walk in the dark last night. The clouds were firing past the moon and jupiter giving a very eery feel as the light levels rose and fell dramatically and the wind tore threw the branches. This rushed picture shows a blurred moon, seen through some branches. The moon and Jupiter were very close to each other last night, near conjunction and a blurred Jupiter can hopefully just be seen below it and to the left, also mired in cloud. One of the branches is close to touching it.

We had some old friends staying this weekend and decided to laugh in the general direction of the forecasts and go for a walk in the woods. It was dry for half an hour, but then the clouds moving over our heads, and visible in the gaps between the near-bare trees, changed their scudding direction by almost ninety degrees. This was the starting gun for a predicted and yet sudden change in our weather fortunes. We turned at our halfway point, the 18th century Nore Folly perched at the edge of the woods and looking out over Slindon and the south coast. The rain came down hard, and then harder still and then the hail came too. The upside of such weather is that you don’t have to be cold and wet for long before you feel you have earned a three course Sunday lunch and hours spent reading the papers…

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This morning I gave a talk to 30 pupils in Year 1 at my son’s school. Much scarier than talking to 500 people at the Royal Geographical Society!

I’ve just published a couple of articles I have written and which are exclusive to this site. The first is about whether we have a ‘sixth sense‘ that helps us navigate. The second is about whether men and women have different navigation abilities.

I’m just back from giving a short talk at the Royal Institute of Navigation’s Land Conference at the National Physical Laboratory.

I learnt plenty from the other speakers and chats during the breaks. One little gem: the Apollo program nearly lost two astronauts, literally. They were roaming the lunar surface and became temporarily unaware where ‘home’ was. Without a map, compass, GPS or any other instrument there were some tense moments before they found their way back successfully. Definitely an opportunity for some natural navigation training in this niche market, as I was not too shy to point out to the assembled!

Something that makes a walk on the moon more challenging than on earth is that the moon has a much smaller radius and therefore has a more dramatically curved surface, the result being you cannot see nearly as far on the moon as you can on Earth. All other things…

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