The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

I took this picture looking south over Halnaker Hill, the windmill can just be seen poking out at the top. On my outdoor courses I sometimes stop early on and ask people to give me as many clues to direction as possible. Quite often this leads to much frenzied studying of lichens and branches and lots of good ideas. More often than not I find myself having to point out a big one. ‘What’s the biggest clue you can see?’ Some might say the shape of the land, but very few spot the coast itself. If visibility is poor I resist the urge to borrow from a Mr Basil Fawlty and say, ‘It’s there between the land and sky.’

I had been working on the chapter about the sea in my book last week, so was even more finely tuned to its vagaries than normal as we crossed to the Isle of Wight on Saturday morning.

The sea’s colour is influenced by its depth, the colour of the seabed, salinity, microorganisms, silt and light levels to name a few factors.

The subtle shift in colour can be seen as the sea shallows to the coast off Ryde. The dark horizontal strip in the middle distance is caused by a thin cumulus cloud.

My thanks to Richard, who sent in this picture from a lad’s walking weekend along the Jurassic Coast. He was given a private course as a birthday present and was on the lookout for natural signposts. Wind and trees don’t scream direction a lot louder than this. He also spotted sand blown only over the northeastern edge of a horse training area and found Polaris, but then struggled to see it from the inside of a pub.

This is a picture I took about half an hour ago and it is one of those that might be dismissed by those not trained in the dark arts as a ‘typical English country scene’. With closer inspection it yields navigational fruit aplenty.

The foreground shadow confirms that the sun is no longer visible from this viewpoint, but the direction of the early evening sun is easy to detect from the long shadows in the middle ground. We are therefore looking south.

The smoke from the two fires reveals that the wind is light and variable. In the space of little more than a hundred metres it goes from next to nothing to a light north-easterly breeze.

In the top left of the picture, just above the tree line the south coast sea can just be seen. It is running from left to right, or an east-west line, which…

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