The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

A tiny piece about ‘Les Ecrehous’ islands, that I had written for the Guardian ages ago, featured in it last Saturday. Here it is:

This year I was lucky enough to spend some time on a place called Les Écréhous. It is a place you spend time on, not in. Five miles northeast of Jersey, these three tiny islands stand precariously above the water at high tide, surrounded by rocks that have claimed countless lives in the past. When the tide recedes the dots in the sea join up, forming the most rugged landscape of sharp dark shapes, broken only by a few curves of sand. At low tide it is possible to walk for half an hour over land that spends most of its time deep underwater.
It is the ultimate coastal experience, filled with rich evidence of life – we found baby cuttlefish squirting ink in the rock pools –…

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We spent the weekend on Alderney. We went there to muck about on the beaches and we were not disappointed. The water is still fresh at this time of year, but I cannot think of an island with better beaches.

This is a photo taken looking out to the Fort from Longis Beach on the southeastern part of the island. Alderney is famous for its powerful tides and you can see how churned up the water is getting on the left halft of the picture, as it races across the causeway.

Time and navigation have a cosy relationship, as John Harrison, inventor of the chronometer that cracked the longitude problem in the 18th Century would attest. The sun, earth, moon and planets and stars have at times been seen as cogs in a huge clock.

So many natural phenomena take their orders from these bodies and tide is one of the best known of these. I took this photo of the tide running past a cardinal off Jersey this weekend. The cardinal is an easterly one, signalling that the safer water lay to the east of it. But could it tell us anything else? With two pieces of information, time and tide table, we can discern others such as the speed of the water and its direction. If we had no other references: no sight of land, no chart, no compass, no GPS… that small patch of water could reveal not only…

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