The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

I have just returned from a wonderful couple of days in the Lake District. I was at the ‘Words by the Water‘ literary festival in Keswick in the Lake District. My thanks to Kay and Steve for hosting such a great event. When I was invited to give a talk it did not take long to make up my mind: a literary festival, in a theatre by a lake, surrounded by beautiful mountains? Where do I sign?

It would have been churlish not to sample some of the local bumps whilst up there and I enjoyed a fantastic walk up to High Street (named after the Roman Road that went over the peak). The conditions changed almost instantly, as they are wont to do at this time of year, from mild and sunny to bitter cold, freezing fog and ferocious winds near the summit. The map came out to…

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These two photographs were taken this morning, within a few seconds of each other and from exactly the same spot. In the book I touch on the difference between viewing mist horizontally and vertically and these pictures illustrate the point nicely.

Mist and fog, which is just a word for intense mist, are low visibility caused by looking through millions of suspended water particles. When we look horizontally we have to look through hundreds of metres of these particles and the effect is very poor visibility. But since the mist often sits in a thin blanket that hugs the land, the story is very different when we look vertically upwards. (Or downwards if you are a pilot searching for somewhere to land.)

Looking upwards it is often possible to find clouds, as in the second picture, and if you have remained tuned to the direction the clouds are moving,…

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President Obama was visibly furious with his British escort team after his secure cavalcade accidentally drove into the tiny Devon village of Clovelly. The armour-plated vehicles were too wide for the narrow cobbled streets and became wedged. Locals of the picturesque, but sleepy fishing village were woken by the sound of police motorbikes and two helicopters overhead. One resident told us, ‘Mr Obama was clearly upset, but we gave him a nice cup of tea and some homemade biscuits and that seemed to settle him.’ Mrs Avril, from the tourist board thought that it was due to the lead driver following his SatNav, ‘One of the policemen seemed very irate, he ripped a gadget off his motorbike and was jumping up and down on it. I told him he should have realised that he was heading the wrong way just by looking at the sun! That upset him even more…

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When sorting some photos last night this picture – taken a few weeks ago on a very cold morning in Chichester harbour – came close to being deleted. I had a change of heart and decided to rescue it and elevate it to my blog. Rarely have the fortunes of a picture changed so suddenly or dramatically… OK, that’s a bit much, not least since it is a rubbish picture. It’s one redeeming feature and indeed its only feature is that the flash does help illustrate that fog is made up of lots of tiny droplets.

It is only a small step from thinking about such things to wracking one’s mind desperately trying to understand the difference between fog and mist. They are essentially the same, it is a question of degree. Fog is just mist that you can’t see very far in. Pilots define this being less than 1000…

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