The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

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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I woke very early this morning and felt restless so headed into the Downs for a walk. I listened to the Shipping Forecast in the car on the way, feeling instantly integrated into the fragmented dawn community of fishermen and farmers.

There were some spectacular sights as the sun rose and fought back the mist over the Arun Valley. The views were filled with colour experiments too as the pinks and oranges of the sky rose in a crescendo that battled with the whites and greens closer to the ground. In the end the orange clashed too grossly with the yellows of a field of rapeseed and I had to look away.

Yesterday afternoon I received the following email from a young navigator called Luke Hardy:

This Saturday, just gone, myself and two friends went on our local walking competition – the Charnwood Hike.  The aim is to complete…

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I went for a stroll this morning in a pair of Ugg boots. My eyes were drawn up to where the taller trees’ branches were getting lost in the mist, but then a strange sensation in my feet pulled my eyes down again. The ground was strewn with the discarded purple flowers of the ash trees above, each step was being cushioned by the soft bounce of the dead flowers.

The mists hang merrily over the cold fields of Eartham village in West Sussex.

A thick cold damp mist is bogged in over the South Downs this morning. I haven’t been out much this week as I seem to have been zooming up and down the A roads to the Royal Geographical Society and back. On Monday night it was the last president, Prof Sir Gordon Conway’s farewell lecture followed by a black tie dinner with the new President, Michael Palin CBE. Good food for mind and body and, as always at the RGS, great company and stories round the tables.

Yesterday I gave my Beginner’s Guide to Natural Navigation course for another wonderfully diverse gang. A smattering of walkers, pilots and sailors, but among them a filmmaker, mum, banker, psychiatrist, gardener, construction engineer and designer.

The RGS is always a fun place to spend the day, but it had an unusual and slightly surreal feel to it yesterday as there was a…

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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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