The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

Welcome to the Natural Navigator

The Gooley family spent Saturday in the lovely surroundings of West Dean enjoying their annual Chilli Fiesta. It was both an enjoyable and serendipitous occasion.

My gardening skills are usually limited to lawnmowing and leaving a small wake of destruction with a strimmer. About the only area where I have had any success with bringing new lives into the garden rather than violently curtailing old ones is in growing chillis. I have ten different varieties grown from seed and although not all bearing fruit, yet, they are all notably alive.

The West Dean Chilli Fiesta is a bit of Mecca to amateur growers like myself so it is a rather bizarre coincidence that West Dean is also where my courses in October are being held. Something I mulled over as the August rain ran off my nose and my mouth burned with a rather excellent jalapeno and papaya sauce.

A friend has just sent over a thought for the day:

‘Put three grains of sand in a vast cathedral, and the cathedral will be more closely packed with sand than space is with stars.’ – Sir James Jeans (1877 – 1946)

It doesn’t help us find our way, but it is a reminder to be grateful if we do find a star that helps.

(Thanks Anthony!)

The skies above the Natural Navigator last night as he tried to devise an ingenious new method to catch a pair of errant chickens.

(Picture taken by Ben Davis of Chichester Design, who designed this webite.)

Having spent the morning organising images for upcoming courses, I was reminded of a regular problem with learning anything practical from nature. There is a real tendency to bias. By which I mean when we are learning something new there is a great temptation to either make our observations fit our predictions, or to overlook things until we find something that looks the way we want it to.

Moss on trees and buildings is a great example of this. The popular notion is that moss will grow on the north side. This is sometimes true, but often not and for a good reason. The harsh truth is that moss doesn’t care where north is at all. Moss will grow where moisture is retained and this is determined by rain, sun, wind and other factors. If it was only about the sun then it would be a far better indicator…

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It has been an interesting week so far. The website went live a couple of weeks ago, but this week has been about raising awareness. I’ve emailed lots of close friends and lots of people I haven’t seen or spoken to in years. It is one of the nice surprises of launching a new venture, particularly if you’re bad at staying in touch like me, it helps reconnect you with old friends.

On a completely different subject, last night I was a little weary and was trying to find excuses so that I didn’t have to mow the lawn. It was sunny, but there were dark clouds on the horizon. Perhaps if I waited long enough it would become too wet to mow? Finally I fired the lawnmower up and got to work on our small patch of grass that sits between the rebellious chickens* and the house. Soon, to…

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Back from holiday to me means back to the joys and evils of modern life. In the remotest part of south Brittany where we had chosen to hide from the real world for a fortnight, there were no landline telephones, no newspapers, no TV, no radio, no computers and no internet. We had to learn how to speak to each other again which was not an entirely smooth process. If you haven’t tried it recently let me warn you that it is a lot harder than ignoring each other and pretending to text someone.

One of the joys of returning was the ability to access information. One of the evils is being bombarded with the stuff. I decided to focus on the positives last night and used the internet for what it seems best at: unearthing truly obscure bits of information.

I am now the proud owner of a…

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This morning, as our Land Rover rolled onto the Brittany ferry, or MV Bretagne as she likes to be called, I had a cunning plan. I would use the pretence of work to escape the mayhem that was sure to ensue on our return from our summer holiday. While our young boys tried and generally succeeded to convince their mum that two hours of singing clowns and suspect magic were preferable to another game of ‘destroy the duty free shop and then pillage the canteen’, I would slip out onto the deck with a notepad and pen.

The wind was SSW about force 5. The speed of the ferry meant that the difference between true and apparent wind was stark and varied significantly depending on whether you stood in the slipstream or behind a break of some sort. The waves, however, did not succumb to such vagaries and marched obediently…

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There is a scene in the 80s spoof movie Top Secret where Val Kilmer is busy painting the scene from a moving train. We later see the result of his work: a blur of green.

I was reminded of this as we made our regular short and longer drives around the Brittany countryside. We covered 1500 miles in just over a fortnight and the number of times that the trees yielded all their navigational secrets to me in our moving car were vastly outnumbered by sights of leaves and branches blurring into one. Sometimes the collective sight of trees leaning to the east from the wind, or the rare silhouette detectable through summer foliage gave an excellent snapshot. All too often however the green of summer made things trickier.

I reminded myself of the bleeding obvious one one occasion as I allowed my curiosity about a tree that appeared to…

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Our summer holiday was at last beginning and all the joys and trepidations of a family outing with small children concentrated themselves into the lower section of the fast ferry from Poole to St Malo in Brittany.

Rather unoriginally, I have always viewed seasickness as a mixture of the mental and the physical. I have seen war veterans reduced to blubbering wrecks and watched young children play snap through a howler. Oh the mysteries of the inner ear and the mind. Although I have been very queasy hundreds of times during travel, I am rarely sick. This is not always a good thing and has been much to my regret on occasion, as the old saying goes,

‘There are two types of seasickness, the type where you are afraid you are going to die and then the type where you are worried you are not.’

At least getting it all…

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HRH the Duke of Edinburgh was kind enough to take time out to present me with a Royal Institute of Navigation Award this afternoon.

At the reception afterwards he spent a little time chatting with me and a lot longer in deep conversation with Mrs G. He was charming, funny and ‘sparkly’ apparently, whatever that means.