I received an update on the Northwest Passage from Victor Wejer:

Daria,
This day have re-written the outcome of 2018 Northwest Passage.
Thor (GER) navigated to Nome, Alaska finishing its transit.
Infinity (GER), this monster ferro-cement 120 ft. & 200 ton Ketch, 450 HP engine with 20 POB crossed Bellot Str. eastbound. Infinity tried few attempts of crossing and the final was the most excruciating with very last half mile of 9+ ice. Met icebreaker there who was tending her self much more than assisting others. Swirling ice eddies, strong 6kt current occupied their last part with one of the crew getting into MOB after slipping off deck onto edge of ice floe. Got retrieved promptly with the fishing net. The only MOB in Bellot history.

Both of them made the history of only (vessels) to make the transit (in 2018).
However, Infinity still has to get at least to Baffin Bay to collect the prize. Fortunately for them the ice conditions on their return is somehow easy despite re-freezing and I am sure they will make it. Baffin this year is very easy for those returning, thanks to Mr. Arctic.
No wintering boats fortunately.
Cheers,
Victor
edited by DariaBlackwell on 9/22/2018

Vice Commodore, OCC 

[quote=Bill Balme]

In the US where I learned to sail, Yachtmaster type courses are simply not available (except online, making the practical side rather complex!) - and sailors are not required to take anything but the most basic boating safety course (I don't think even that is mandatory). When we sailed to the UK I was immediately impressed by the depth of knowledge of the average sailor - it certainly highlights a deficiency in my own training. [/quote]


Bill,

Courses are available in the US. I took an advanced navigation course through the USCG Auxiliary which was very good and got my USCG captain's license which required proctored exams for navigation. It was very thorough.

Mystic Seaport used to do celestial navigation courses - not sure if they do now. I taught myself how to take Noonsites with a sextant using Mary Blewitt's classic book.

The ASA courses which I also took a few of are pretty lame.

There's a relatively new outfit called NauticEd that is doing a much better job of training sailors for cruising. http://www.nauticed.org/ Yes, they do a lot of online theory certification, but they are also growing quickly in the area of on board sail training. They are concentrating on the yacht charter business, but are expanding to include RYA Yachtmaster style certs.

Daria

Vice Commodore, OCC 

Bill
Bob tells me, although he may be pulling my leg, that he has never heard of KAP files, forward looking sonar or Antares Charts. I wonder if an article on technological enhancements to assist in Navigation might be a good place to start with the new mentorship part of the Forum?

[quote=Simon Currin]Bill,
I’m curious. When your boat got struck by lightning did all your various GPS devices get taken out?
[/quote]


All those on the boat got taken out yes - but we weren't on it - so I was able to navigate down to Newport with the iPhone. (Familiar territory, so no issues.)

Normally, when we hear thunder nearby, we put phone and iPad into the oven - not a perfect Faraday cage - but hopefully good enough!

Bill Balme

Bill,
I’m curious. When your boat got struck by lightning did all your various GPS devices get taken out?

Apart from lightning it is hard to imagine the circumstance that would give rise to total GPS failure now that GLONASS and Galileo are coming on stream. The tally of GPS devices on our boat is 7 I think when smartphones, satellite phones and tablets are taken into account.

Sailing without accurate charts does, however, add to the ’adventure’ of sailing off piste. Despite lots of surveying activity by defence interests some areas of the world have had few updates to charts drawn half a century or more ago.

Mentorship should include learning to get the best out of KAP files, accessing satellite images of ice conditions in real-time and figuring out how to navigate beyond the limits of our charts. A better use time I think than rediscovering Astro - unless, of course that’s your passion!

Simon

Posted on behalf of Bob Shepton

Well done Bill for taking on the mentoring of the OCC Forum. Of course I would be willing to share any ill gained knowledge I may have acquired over the years, in spite of the flattery - which will get you everywhere!
But you have started with a corker of a question to which there is no easy answer as far as I can see. No GPS, wow, how quickly we came to rely on it. OK let’s start at the beginning. If you are coastal or offshore sailing and can observe any identifiable land or sea mark then as you will know you can take a bearing with a handheld compass, work out the back bearing and plot it on a chart. Ideally two or three identifiable marks with back bearings to form a cocked hat or triangle and you are in the middle. Or there are a lot of clever running fixes from just one mark and back bearing ably described by Tom Cunliffe in his many books on navigation.
But if you are out in the oceans this is no good at all, except in so far as you can keep a detailed log of courses steered from your last proper fix, at what speed and for how long (to gauge distance run,) and plot this daily on your chart. The longer that goes on for the less accurate your plotted position will be, but hey, if you’re crossing the Atlantic for instance you are bound to hit something the far side. Christopher Columbus was daring but not that clever…..!
But if you want to know your proper position, and most of us do, and there Is no GPS, I can see no alternative but to learn the rudiments of astro navigation. At least carry a sextant, even a cheap one unless you are concerned to have a really accurate fix in which case you must shell out hard cash, and the books describing how to do it. One year returning from the Azores in the days of Sat. Nav. before proper GPS, which gave you a position by Lat and Long approximately every three quarters of an hour, it suddenly went off. Panic! I had not done any astro for three or four years and had forgotten it all – my maths was always suspect. So a hurried reading of the books for revision and the taking of sun shots – the easiest shot to take – and working out of positions crossing with position lines from later sun shots. Fortunately two days later when somebody switched the Sat. Nav. back on again our plotted position was quite close to what the Sat. Nav. said.
If you do go down the astro path, don’t panic! Our very first astro shot ‘in anger’ ,for real, on the way down to the Azores some years previously, had placed us sixty miles inside Spain. We managed to sort it out (it was a deck watch error) and we did make it to Ponta Delgada and Horta… So get out there, turn the GPS off, take you sun or star shot and work it out. Maybe do it for two or three days, and then turn your GPS back on to see how you have done!
Incidentally I have always found learning the two formulas which you can use on a scientific calculator for finding ‘z’ and ‘hc’ etc much easier than carrying the bulky air navigation tables. I don’t really understand what Sin, Cos etc mean, but it works……we did our ‘First School to sail Across the Atlantic and Back’ by astro alone, and we even hit the places we were aiming for - Portland UK to Portland (Maine) USA, and back! It’s hard work in a gale of which there were a lot, but it worked……

Mea Cupla I guess! I am one of those that only started sailing relatively recently and if they turned off the GPS system I'd be in a world of hurt!

I can plot a GPS position on a chart - but I'd be very slow at it. So much so, I basically rely on electronic charts. Despite that, my paper charts pile seems to keep on growing - but I don't rely on those charts for at-the-moment navigation - more for planning.

In the US where I learned to sail, Yachtmaster type courses are simply not available (except online, making the practical side rather complex!) - and sailors are not required to take anything but the most basic boating safety course (I don't think even that is mandatory). When we sailed to the UK I was immediately impressed by the depth of knowledge of the average sailor - it certainly highlights a deficiency in my own training.


I have recently taken on responsibility for the OCC Forum and one aspect that I will be concentrating on is mentoring - an area of the Forum where people can ask dumb questions without getting ridiculed and where hopefully our experienced sailors will offer up nuggets of wisdom that the whole group can benefit from. I hope Bob, that you'd be a willing participant in sharing your undoubted wealth of knowledge and encouraging our less experienced Associate Members gain their OCC wings. Perhaps yo'd like to start with outlining exactly how you would advise people practice without the use of GPS - what would be the exercises you would want to see completed?

Bill Balme

Reply on behalf of Bob Shepton

To add a comment to Dick Stevenson’s observations, this is the irony of progress. I can remember years ago when GPS made its first appearance, my friend and mentor Willy Kerr with his famous Assent, and even a lowly follower as myself, being very concerned. Suddenly people could know exactly where they were and so set off across oceans with a new confidence but without having served their apprenticeship and gained the necessary experience. It’s a Catch 22 situation really because there is no way on the other hand that we could wish there was no GPS. But how to persuade people to put in the necessary miles first? And I had better not start a bleat about Rallies which could also be seen as giving people a false confidence……

A little provisional summary of 2018 Northwest Passage activity:

- 21 sail boats intended to battle.
- 3 didn't start.
- 1 with no engine barely touched the boundary of NWP.
- Out of two boats heading East, only one reached the way point in Cambridge
Bay to winter.
- 14 boats withdrew
- Only one, German "Thor", a Exploration 52, is still running strong westbound in the Arctic after being beset in heavy ice for 3 weeks in the central Arctic.
- One sank.

I am not aware of any other sail boats.

The year to remember.

Hi all,
I support the overall thrust of these posts. They are in the realm of a head-set that I have written about a few times over the years: basically that if we do not “police” ourselves, someone else will move in and do it in our stead. And if it is a gov’t bureaucracy, they will likely do it poorly to the detriment of all sailors. The NW passage is a great example of an area where some cruisers should just plain be strongly discouraged from making the attempt. Every year I also hear of sailors doing passages, crossing the Atlantic, etc. whose boats are not well prepared and whose skippers and crew do not have the requisite experience. Often their crew (wife/friends) do not have the experience to judge whether they are in safe hands. And all these boats are carrying EPIRBS and the moment the call goes out, the SAR crews are putting their lives at risk. Many of the mayday calls I read about are by boats/crews who, in my casual observation of reports, should never have been out there in the first place.
Now, if someone is determined, then they will do what they want at sea. Some, however, might be dissuaded from poorly prepared voyages and helped to find ways to gain experience and to be better prepared, both individually and to have his/her boat well prepared, for the planned passage. This seems to me something the OCC might be valuable in spearheading.
My best, Dick Stevenson, s/v Alchemy