The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

A belated thank you to everyone who came to my talk at the Marine Studios in Margate a week ago, and another thanks to those who also bought a book afterwards.

I arrived an hour early and walked down to the beautiful beach and went for a swim (yes that really is it in the photo). I then dried myself off in the beach car park, with the car radio on as I listened to Andy Murray losing, valiantly, to Rafael Nadal. A more British experience would be hard to imagine. I walked up to the Studios to give the talk, watching a kid go beserk after dropping an ice cream and feeling the sand between my toes.

Whilst very vaguely on the subject of swimming, the Independent invited me to be on their Best 50 swimming spots in the UK panel. The results can be found here.

Another very enjoyable Beginner’s Guide to Natural Navigation course at West Dean College on Saturday. There were sailors, walkers, a forager and an army officer among the ever-varied student backgrounds. My thanks to all for coming.

Last night, shortly after 10.30, I took this photograph of the moon rising above the woods and emerging from behind thin clouds. It looks very much like a full moon, but is actually one day after full, a waning moon. It does highlight the difficulty of judging the phase of the moon accurately.

From an aesthetic perspective there is no need to be able to judge the moon’s phase, but if you are trying to use the ‘phase method’ of finding direction from the moon then it is vital. I go into a lot of detail of this method in the book, because it is very satisfying but no less challenging. In a nutshell, you can work…

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My thanks to everyone who came to my talk last night at the Weald and Downland Museum. What a wonderful place to spend a summer’s evening, I recommend a visit to anyone who has yet to sample its delights.

On a different note, I received a fascinating letter recently from someone who has read the book. They wrote to me with an unusual observation.

I have touched the phenomenon of the ‘green flash’ at sunset in this blog and elsewhere, it is well documented and well heard-of. My correspondent is keen to learn more about something different and since I have been unable to solve the mystery, I promised to publish the extract from his letter here in the hope that a blog reader may be able to offer an insight.

“...My second point is the green flash you mention. My experience was quite different from the quick flash most people seem to…

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Last night I managed to take 46 photographs in a desperate bid to catch the elusive, and some like to say mythical, ‘green flash’ at the moment of sunset. The green flash is an optical phenomenon caused mainly by blue/green light bending more than the reds/yellows. There is a fuller description of its causes on Wikipedia.

I did not manage to see or capture the flash, but peering out across the Persian Gulf at the anchored ships, feeling the cool westerlies coming off its waters as the heat of the day faded… is not a bad way to endure a fruitless search.

It is often very difficult to see the sun clearly at the moment of sunset due to clouds or haze, but there are times when, if the sky is clear, the air is dry enough and the horizon is an ocean, then the sun can be seen very clearly all…

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‘Courting bustards’ is not an excellent new profanity, something that would sound good with rasping voice and sent in the general direction of a parking warden putting a ticket on your car, it is actually a reference to the romantic habits of the male great bustard bird.

Researchers from the IE University School of Biology in Santa Cruz, Spain, have found that the male bustards align themselves with the sun when trying to attract a female. Their white feathers, the bustard’s equivalent of an Armani suit/Ferrari/pair of Reeboks – delete as applicable, show up better when aligned to catch the sun’s rays. Dr Tommaso Pizzari, an ornithologist from Oxford University, observed that although it made the birds more vulnerable to predators, it certainly made them more visible to females. ‘That’s why we think these puzzling traits evolved and are specific to males.’

Although the bustards have been found to do this more…

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I went for a walk in the South Downs yesterday afternoon. The air was cold, there were still chunks of ice lining the north-facing side of chalk ruts in the path. The sun was up for the first part of the walk and made direction-finding easy. When it fell below the hills to my southwest it gave different opportunities. One of my favourite dusk techniques is to use the light reflections of cloud edges to gauge where the sun must be behind higher ground. This photograph from 4.30pm yesterday shows this effect quite clearly. The sun is reaching the far ground, trees and clouds, but it does not light the clouds equally. The bright edges act almost as a parabola, pointing the way back to a now invisible sun.

The picture was taken looking northeast. The very perceptive will have noticed that there are molehills in the foreground and that they…

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…from the Scottish Highlands.

Yesterday afternoon I threw the snow off the Land Rover and headed out into the white – I had about half-a-dozen minor outstanding ‘to-do’s for the book, but there is no point writing a book about natural navigation if you are the sort of person who can resist these conditions. Dressed in a suitably ridiculous balaclava I made my way to the foot of Halnaker Hill and then proceeded uphill in wellies. Unless I’m on a mountain I find wellington boots with two pairs of socks the ideal footwear for small excursions in snow, even good hill-walking boots let some moisture in eventually, but wellies do at least stay dry even if it means slipping about a bit in places.

A roe deer jumped across the path in front of me as I climbed the hill and there was the red breast of a robin waiting on the branch of an…

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My thanks to Fred Smith, a retired airline pilot who was on Thursday’s course, for sending in this shot of the sunset in Tobago. The photo is taken from 11 degrees north, on 14 September, looking slightly north of west at about 6.30pm.

Regular blog readers will know that I am a bit of a fan of Robert Pirsig’s book, ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance‘. I’m just about to finish the sequel, ‘Lila‘, which is also a bit of a positive mind-bender (that is if you have some alternative views, and possibly a negative one if you consider yourself a conformist. Come to think of it, a conformist wouldn’t buy the book, and if they stumbled across it would be unlikely to start it and if they did start it, would be extremely unlikely to finish it.)

Pirsig takes on some massive philosophical beasts in both books, but the freshness of his approach can sometimes be seen best in the way he deals with more simple and natural phenomena. This is his take on the fabled ‘green flash’ of the setting sun,

‘When Phaedrus started to read yachting literature he ran across a…

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