The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

Yesterday afternoon I threw the snow off the Land Rover and headed out into the white – I had about half-a-dozen minor outstanding ‘to-do’s for the book, but there is no point writing a book about natural navigation if you are the sort of person who can resist these conditions. Dressed in a suitably ridiculous balaclava I made my way to the foot of Halnaker Hill and then proceeded uphill in wellies. Unless I’m on a mountain I find wellington boots with two pairs of socks the ideal footwear for small excursions in snow, even good hill-walking boots let some moisture in eventually, but wellies do at least stay dry even if it means slipping about a bit in places.

A roe deer jumped across the path in front of me as I climbed the hill and there was the red breast of a robin waiting on the branch…

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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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Early this evening Mrs G and I escaped for a quick wander aboard Golden Eye, my Contessa 32, in Chichester Harbour. One of the lovely things about the harbour is that when time is short or wind is in short supply it is possible to enjoy a potter on the water that is more akin to a gentle river cruise than a sail.

The 20hp diesel pushed us gently west into a low sun. A moon that was a day off first quarter hung to our left and the line down its midriff, the line between light and dark, pointed neatly down to south on the horizon. There was a gentle breeze. It was forecasted to be from the south-west and obliged by making its way dutifully towards us over the harbour water from between the sun and the moon.