The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

My thanks to Tim and Laura Moss, who braved the elements on Bignor Hill yesterday afternoon. They found themselves wrapping up warm and staring into the November wind thanks to a wedding present of a natural navigation course. (I didn’t get to read the card, but maybe it said something along the lines of ‘If you can smile through this, you’ll be very happy!’).

It was a fun afternoon, especially as I got to watch Tim and Laura’s face expressions as they grappled with such fun concepts as ‘How to find the south celestial pole from a field in West Sussex.’ Well, they did ask!

My main reason for posting is to let you know about Tim’s work. He runs ‘The Next Challenge‘, which offers advice, research and logistical support for those who are planning their own expeditions. He’s currently helping Sarah Outen in this capacity, as she…

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It would be true to say that I would not be writing this blog if the sun rose in the same place each day. I don’t mean that in a very general sense, it’s not because the whole world would be very different and maybe the dinosaurs would have survived and humans would never have evolved, blah, blah…

No, it is because in the spring of 2008 I was busy trying to work out whether there was any point in trying to make a living by teaching natural navigation, or not. Whether, perhaps, that was the stupidest idea I had ever had, a competition with some depth in the field. The problem was that there was no ‘sensible’ way of deciding whether to go ahead with it or not. There was no point bouncing the idea off family, bank managers, priests or ouija boards. The answers that would come back…

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A subject that I have blogged about in the past is one I return to today. I am increasingly delighted at the diversity of background interests of those who also take an interest in natural navigation.

I regularly give talks to specialist groups, only last Monday night I found myself at the Sandhurst Social Club, speaking to the knowledgeable and very likeable Yateley Offshore Sailing Club. Such specialized gatherings have a mutual interest that draws them together and so variety quite naturally gives way to experience in one area.

On the Beginner’s Guide courses that I run, however, there is no such need for a unifying interest and the backgrounds of those who come is a never-ending source of joy for me. On Friday’s course at the Royal Geographical Society, there was a mountain-marathon runner, an astrologer, a Duke of Edinburgh leader, an amateur astronomer, a nautical circumnavigator and,  not…

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Nearly all navigation is an attempt to join landmarks together. Even those on boats crossing oceans are probably hoping to find a landmark they recognise as the final part of their journey.

The word, ‘landmark’, simply means something that makes a location recognisable. It is deliberately vague as it can apply to anything, a landmark may be extraordinary – the statue of Christ the Redeemer towering over Rio de Janeiro’s from Corcovado mountain. Or it may be mundane – a red postbox at the edge of a village.

The more confident you can be that you have both successfully identified a landmark and that you know exactly where that landmark is, the more confident you can be that you know where you are.

A landmark does not need to be grand, it does not even need to be recognised by others, just so long as it is recognised by you.…

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The sort of morning that navigators dream about. A stroll around the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth. No agenda, just a meander.

I had been aching to visit for a long time, but even with my predilection for getting around a bit, Falmouth is not en route to many places and so it took a while to find the right excuse. The perfect excuse turned out to be: “I want to go to the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth and so I am going to go to the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth.” Said without, I must emphasise, any hint of Lesley Gore.

What pleasures and treasures lay in store! A theodolite used by Admiral John Lort Stokes on his surveys of the Australian and New Zealand coasts. A whole heap of lighthouse paraphernalia. And a surveyor’s chain that measured 22 yards, naturally, since a chain is…

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On a Country Navigator course on Saturday, I was asked a question that I get asked quite regularly:

“What sort of people come on your courses?”

It is both an easy and difficult question to answer. The difficult part is that the backgrounds of those who have an interest in natural navigation is extremely diverse. It is tempting to say that it could not be more diverse, but that is not true; by the time someone finds themselves on one of my courses they have selected themselves as someone who can reach the UK (typically) and also someone who either is willing and able to spend some income on a rare skill or is close to someone who is willing to do that for them as a present. Put another, more flippant way, I don’t get many subsistence farmers from Africa or Asia on my courses.

It is fair however…

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Another very enjoyable Beginner’s Guide to Natural Navigation course at the Royal Geographical Society yesterday. The diversity of interests and experiences never fails to amaze me; from desert wanderers to cruise ship sailors and even a sailor from a tall ship in the Pacific. Wonderful!

It was a beautiful full moon last night and I got to experiment with a new lens that I have bought. Still a long way to go until I take a photo of the moon that I am happy with, but always learning which is satisfying.

The phase of the moon appears the same all over the world, but the orientation changes depending on your latitude. In other words, a full moon will be full all over the world, but its features may appear upside down from the opposite hemisphere. When high in the sky, crescent moons will appear closer to ‘vertical’ at higher…

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Another Beginner’s Guide course at West Dean College and another very enjoyable day. As usual a very diverse group, which always adds to the day. Today’s group brought with them experience in rock-climbing, law, drainage, the Royal Marines, sailing, IT, horse-racing, tax, astronomy, farming and professional carp fishing.

A blog is not a blog without an occasional rant, so…

It strikes me that the world of navigation training has strayed a little off course. If you type “navigation courses” into Google you get nearly five and a half million results. I’d be prepared to wager that more than five million of these are associated with ‘traditional’ training. To my mind the majority of these are falling between two stools. They focus on using tools but not the best ones. The two ends of the spectrum are electronics and nature. Nobody, myself included, argues that natural methods are more accurate than electronics when it is working. Equally, nobody in their right mind would want to challenge someone holding a working GPS to a position-fixing competition using compass back-bearings. Where am I going with this?

Well, why do we concentrate the vast majority of our training and learning in the…

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