The only specialised marine publication in Oceania that focuses on the maritime industry, from super yachts to small craft to large commercial ships, including coastal shipping, tugs, tow boats, barges, ferries, tourist, sport-fishing craft
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WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT BY MICHAEL PIGNÉGUY L et's be honest here, how many of you would be entirely comfortable taking a vessel of any size from Auckland to Bluff or even across the Hauraki Gulf on a dark night without any electronic navigation aids on board? All you can have are some paper charts and a magnetic compass suitable for taking bearings with. I suspect there probably aren't a lot of hands going up. It wasn't so long ago, maybe 30 years or less, whn a magnetic compass and chart was all many coastal navigators had to get their vessel safely around the coast. A gyro-compass was a real luxury and then came radar, although this was not always well received by some old timers. In the late 1950s, I sailed with a captain who never once looked at the radar on the bridge during a circumnavigation of Africa. He said he had been through two world wars without one and couldn't see the need for them now. And a fine navigator he was, too. With the advent of electronic navigation aids came their misuse and mistrust, and in the early days of radar there were a number of well-known radar-assisted collisions. One of the better known occurred in 1956, when the 29,100 tonne Italian passenger ship Andrea Doria sank after she was involved in a collision with the 12,644 tonne Swedish passenger ship Stockholm. The number of groundings in the Pacific Ocean increased Save Money And Fuel! And Now We Are Making It Available To You! To Ships In The Ice, Agricultural, Automotive Engineers, Generation, Suppliers. We Supply Everyone From Trucking Fleets CHORNCO'S PROPRIETARY RANGE OF PRODUCTS, PRODUCE COST SAVING BENEFITS THAT: ■ Reduce noxious emissions ■ Reduce fuel consumption ■ Replace fuel lubricity ■ Improves equipment performance ■ Sustain equipment effi ciency ■ Lower maintenance related costs ■ Eliminate Diesel Bug ■ Extend related equipment longevity when navigators started to rely implicitly upon positions obtained from satellite navigation systems. The positions were accurate enough, but the paper charts being used were not created using the same datum. With both radar and satnavs, fatal errors in their use were mostly caused through lack of training and understanding, and also forgetting to use basic navigation skills. It's still happening of course, with the spectacular examples of the Rena and Le Costa Concordia. Today, electronic navigation systems, radar, the automatic identification system (AIS) and a host of other electronic navigational aids can make the human navigator an almost unnecessary appendage in the cockpit or on a bridge. At times, as with the above examples, it may be better if humans were not involved with the ship's navigation! But seriously, why should we still bother with a magnetic compass, working out its errors, taking bearings and plotting them on a paper chart? The younger students I teach often ask this question and fair enough too, as most of them have been on superyachts navigated purely by electronic systems and have safely cruised the world with hardly a need to look out the wheelhouse window. Many of these yachts have more than one navigational system with even deckhands having their own handheld system, complete with GPS, worldwide charts and tides and star almanacs, plus the ability for them to talk to Mum from the mid- Pacific. They don't make good coffee… yet! With all that electronic navigational gear on board, why is it still necessary for us to teach modern navigators how to navigate using a magnetic compass? Of course, there is more involved than just knowing how to use the compass and take bearings; without electronic navigation aids you have to be more aware of your surroundings, not only on board your vessel but also of the environment your vessel is operating in. The coastline, with its hills, valleys, headlands and lights, becomes an important potential navigational aid, not forgetting the depth and contours of the seabed. This involves looking out the wheelhouse windows and actively using the skills to truly navigate. "But we have all these back-up systems, so we don't really need to know this other stuff," the students say. I can truthfully say that when I relieve as skipper on a superyacht, the more electronics I see on board the more problems I know there will be, as they rarely operate fault-free. A case in point was when I was skippering a 50m motoryacht for the 1100 mile run down to Mauritius from the Seychelles and all three GPS systems on the bridge failed, with no back- ups. "That's funny," the mate said, "that's happened before!" So it was back to basics before we saw the peaks of Mauritius rise on the horizon. Offi ce 03-329-7834, Fax 03-329-7808 Email: Ralph@newfueltech.com Web: www.newfueltech.com RALPH STARK 021-586-877 CONTACT US TODAY: 54 Professional Skipper May/June 2012 It is also always possible, for whatever reason, for the governments that control the navigation satellites to have a good reason to flick the switch and turn them off. That's a scary thought for many modern navigators! There are a therefore a number of good reasons why the basics of "hands-on navigation" practices should continue to be taught and practised, not the least of which is that being a professional navigator is knowing what to do when the lights go out. VIP.S68