The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

One of the things that I love about running my courses is that I’m guaranteed to learn something too, but because of the diverse backgrounds of those that attend I can never guess what area it will be in. Over the past few courses I have learnt something about drumlins, Foucault’s pendulum, moles and sewage smells. This is a subject that is wonderfully difficult to pigeonhole, which reminds me…

The Geographical magazine asked me today whether I considered myself a geographer.

I gave the following, slightly long-winded answer:

‘Am I a geographer? Good question, but no short answer I’m afraid. My niche has a lot of geography in it, but is probably not part of what the academic geographical world would consider its domain. Natural navigation sits astride many fields including geography, meteorology, natural science and astronomy, to name a few.

However, my recent trip to Libya…

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A fresh peach of a dawn this morning. The contrails in the first photo have a clear southeast track to them which is not unexpected as there’s lots of civilisation to the distant southeast of Sussex and relatively little in other distant directions.

Dawn light always feels very different to sunset light. I use the word feel deliberately, because the actual light and colour differences are often subtle. Even if they look similar our normal sleep patterns and lifestyles, combined with the temperature differences mean that we rarely look at a sunset and dawn with similar sensations. If we are in a familiar place we know where to expect morning or evening light, but even mid-Atlantic robbed of lots of other stimuli they feel massively different, one heralding an end to cold and the other respite from sweltering.

But do they actually look different? Yes. The familiar pinks, oranges…

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‘Sagur, a spirit and chief, lived on the island of Pulap with his daughter, Inosagur. As she bathed in the lagoon before the canoe house one morning, she beheld a rainbow. It became a spirit, Anumwerici, which came to her. The spirit had eaten all the inhabitants of Truk and Naminuoito; now he intended to eat the people of Pulap, too.

But Sagur told his daughter to fetch a little piece of taro and a small drinking coconut. Although Anumwerici complained this would not be enough, each time he tipped the cup containing the taro to his mouth it was refilled. the same thing happened with the drinking coconut. Anumwerici ate and drank his fill. Never, he said, had he been so satisfied.

In gratitude he taught Inosagur navigation. He placed her in a small coconut tree and by magic made it grow above the clouds. Inosagur could see all…

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The Gooley family spent Saturday in the lovely surroundings of West Dean enjoying their annual Chilli Fiesta. It was both an enjoyable and serendipitous occasion.

My gardening skills are usually limited to lawnmowing and leaving a small wake of destruction with a strimmer. About the only area where I have had any success with bringing new lives into the garden rather than violently curtailing old ones is in growing chillis. I have ten different varieties grown from seed and although not all bearing fruit, yet, they are all notably alive.

The West Dean Chilli Fiesta is a bit of Mecca to amateur growers like myself so it is a rather bizarre coincidence that West Dean is also where my courses in October are being held. Something I mulled over as the August rain ran off my nose and my mouth burned with a rather excellent jalapeno and papaya sauce.

Our summer holiday was at last beginning and all the joys and trepidations of a family outing with small children concentrated themselves into the lower section of the fast ferry from Poole to St Malo in Brittany.

Rather unoriginally, I have always viewed seasickness as a mixture of the mental and the physical. I have seen war veterans reduced to blubbering wrecks and watched young children play snap through a howler. Oh the mysteries of the inner ear and the mind. Although I have been very queasy hundreds of times during travel, I am rarely sick. This is not always a good thing and has been much to my regret on occasion, as the old saying goes,

‘There are two types of seasickness, the type where you are afraid you are going to die and then the type where you are worried you are not.’

At least getting it all…

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HRH the Duke of Edinburgh was kind enough to take time out to present me with a Royal Institute of Navigation Award this afternoon.

At the reception afterwards he spent a little time chatting with me and a lot longer in deep conversation with Mrs G. He was charming, funny and ‘sparkly’ apparently, whatever that means.

Stumbled across a bit of a gem this evening. Marion Owen, ‘master gardener’, describing the moment she decided to become a gardener at the end of a long passage from Guam to Seattle.

If navigation is about where we are and where we are going, then the senses have a bigger part to play than many realise, and not just physically. Marion’s passage about a passage beautifully illustrates that honing our senses can get us to our destination in more ways than one. She found land and a new career.

Here are some excerpts:

‘Wall-to-wall ocean, especially in the warm tropics, does something to your senses…

…salt crystals form on the decks and railings–even your skin– like granules of sugar. With the acrid smell of ocean water and sweat, always sweat, mixed with suntan lotion and more salt air, your nose is dulled with monotony…

Leaning against the metal…

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