The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

I have just returned from a wonderful couple of days in the Lake District. I was at the ‘Words by the Water‘ literary festival in Keswick in the Lake District. My thanks to Kay and Steve for hosting such a great event. When I was invited to give a talk it did not take long to make up my mind: a literary festival, in a theatre by a lake, surrounded by beautiful mountains? Where do I sign?

It would have been churlish not to sample some of the local bumps whilst up there and I enjoyed a fantastic walk up to High Street (named after the Roman Road that went over the peak). The conditions changed almost instantly, as they are wont to do at this time of year, from mild and sunny to bitter cold, freezing fog and ferocious winds near the summit. The map came out to…

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These two photographs were taken this morning, within a few seconds of each other and from exactly the same spot. In the book I touch on the difference between viewing mist horizontally and vertically and these pictures illustrate the point nicely.

Mist and fog, which is just a word for intense mist, are low visibility caused by looking through millions of suspended water particles. When we look horizontally we have to look through hundreds of metres of these particles and the effect is very poor visibility. But since the mist often sits in a thin blanket that hugs the land, the story is very different when we look vertically upwards. (Or downwards if you are a pilot searching for somewhere to land.)

Looking upwards it is often possible to find clouds, as in the second picture, and if you have remained tuned to the direction the clouds are moving,…

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We spend most of our time looking horizontally. This morning was a misty one and looking out across the fields the mist felt thick and soup-like. Whenever the mist or fog settles in it is worth taking a moment to look up.

When we look vertically up we usually see the mist at its thinnest and it can sometimes be a pleasant surprise to realise that far from being completely smothered we’re actually in a thin blanket. This is a lesson that all pilots learn at some stage, usually with a little adrenalin mixed in.

It is not unusual in a light aircraft to fly over your airfield and look down through a thin mist to see the runways clearly, only to find that a minute later the slanting angle back to the runway can make the whole airfield ‘disappear’ – a real pulse-raiser the first few times it…

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This morning brought with it a nice thick radiation fog, which the sun will probably burn off soon. There is not forecast to be much wind today, but even a breeze deals with radiation fog, usually anything over 12 knots.

No visible sun, no discernible wind, these are the conditions that remind us that the trees reflect their environment over a long period. They act as a giant USB stick of data about thousands of days of sun and wind. All we need to do is tune our senses and look for it. The thin branch in the bottom left of the picture has been curved upwards by the prevailing southwest winds over time.

On Sunday morning, when sailing off the south coast, visibility came down to a few hundred metres at times. The sun played some of its usual tricks in the fog and one that I don’t think I’ve seen before. When looking down-sun it created a colourless rainbow-like arch with pure white underneath, it was very like sailing past the Millennium Dome, or whatever it’s called these days. At one point there was one visible when looking towards the sun as well, it felt like sailing between two domes. Surreal.

We were out of sight of land for most of the morning even though it was no more than a couple of miles away for a lot of the time. A small bird (Tit, Warbler?) landed for a brief inspection of some of the ropes, which was comforting and reassured me that we were still within reach of land!