The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

I’m doing some research at the moment and came across this line, written by the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt, about flying fish:

‘Like swallows they shoot forward in thousands in straight lines, always against the waves.’

I’ve seen a fair few flying fish in my time, even been hit by a few. I’ve also come across this idea that they always fly in a set direction relative to the waves a couple of times before, but I’ve yet to work out whether this is true or not. If so it could offer some interesting navigational pointers for times when the wave direction is hard to gauge. Anyone able to shed any further light on this?

The flying fish in this picture is one that hit me in the face in the night when crossing the Atlantic singlehanded. It gave me one hell of a shock, but lost the fight…

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…with a little help from the sun.

An interesting article on the BBC website today about the seasonal habits of Puffins.

The most interesting thing other than learning more about the puffins’ whereabouts was the method they used for understanding where the birds were at any one time. Using ‘geolocator tags’ that logged the time of sunrise, sunset the research team were able to deduce their location.

‘The loggers work by measuring light levels, recording when dawn and dusk occurs each day.

With this data, researchers can calculate day length, when midday occurs, and the daily longitudinal and latitudinal co-ordinates for the individual bird.’

The tags also detected when the birds’ feet were wet, the hope being that this would give information about when the birds were airborne, but the puffins foxed the researchers here: they like to tuck their feet up into their plumage when asleep. Their feet…

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I was in Brighton yesterday afternoon and the coast was being hit hard by a southerly gale. When the wind is this strong it is interesting feeling how its direction twists and turns round the streets of a town like Brighton. It never turns a full 180 degrees, but regularly gusts out from alleyways at right angles to the main wind. The smudge in the sky in the top left of the photo is a flock of birds.

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.

One of the keys to navigating with nature is appreciating scale. It is vital that we do not spend too much time focusing too narrowly or widely. In this photograph, taken in the South Downs on Monday, our eyes are naturally led to the fallen tree. It would be very easy to miss both a bigger clue to direction and a smaller one.

The heart of the tree is marginally closer to our side of the tree, which hints that we are south of it, looking north.

If we peer through the undergrowth and bare tree branches we can see that the land falls away to lower country in the distance. The South Downs are a predominantly east/west range of hills and so any time that we can see a long way down into lower land it suggests that we are looking north or south. The hills are also close…

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Last night I stumbled across a name I have been looking for since a sailing trip a couple of months ago, when I took this photo. I now know that the unusual phenomenon in this picture is called a ‘fogbow’. It is similar to a rainbow in many ways, but the fog droplets are so small that instead of light being refracted it is instead diffracted, which leads to a white arc instead of the more familiar colours. Coloured and white bows can occasionally be seen at night, if there are the right atmospheric conditions and a bright moon, but these are given the fair name of ‘moonbows’.

Apparently it also has something to do with quantum wavelengths, but that sounds like one for a rainier day than today and it’s pretty wet out there as it is.

Those who have been on a course will know the strange pleasure that I get from connecting seemingly unrelated things through natural navigation, so here, before your eyes I will attempt to connect a cat on a dustbin and a Greek orthodox priest.

The Gooleys have just returned from a week visiting family in the Peloponnese. My brother’s house is high in the Greek hills and we found ourselves following the same route down a few times each day on the way to towns, villages or the beach. It was during these trips in the car that I noticed that certain animals and indeed, in the case of one Greek orthodox priest, people appeared with a soothing predictability at certain points on the journey.

There was a corner that I remembered well for the dustbin which invariably had this cat sitting on it, and the turning to the…

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This morning, as our Land Rover rolled onto the Brittany ferry, or MV Bretagne as she likes to be called, I had a cunning plan. I would use the pretence of work to escape the mayhem that was sure to ensue on our return from our summer holiday. While our young boys tried and generally succeeded to convince their mum that two hours of singing clowns and suspect magic were preferable to another game of ‘destroy the duty free shop and then pillage the canteen’, I would slip out onto the deck with a notepad and pen.

The wind was SSW about force 5. The speed of the ferry meant that the difference between true and apparent wind was stark and varied significantly depending on whether you stood in the slipstream or behind a break of some sort. The waves, however, did not succumb to such vagaries and marched obediently…

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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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