I find it difficult to judge swinging distances and have often spent sleepless nights worrying about swinging into rocks only to find, when rowing ashore the next morning, that I was miles from the obstruction. This summer we had a new gizmo on board which we found most reassuring. Hunters and golfers, it seems, use cheap(ish) laser range finders to decide if their prey is in range and to decide which club to use. We chose the cheapest offering from Nikon which will measure, with the click of a button, any distance from 10 to 500 metres with an accuracy of a centimetre or two. So now we can judge precise distances off and calculate swinging room with far more accuracy than we will ever need. We even used it to measure air draft by measuring off the bottom of the windex. Great piece of kit.

Great idea!

This is a great idea. Anne is always asking me "aren 't we too close?" I have a laser range finder which I use when deer hunting -- yes us yanks do that kind of thing to keep the deer from eating all the crops. I think it will come on our next cruise. The other thing I have tried is to translate distances into boat lengths. For us 2 boat lengths is about 75 feet (Christian Units - sorry my old UK coworker taught me that one) or about 23 meters. tod engelskirchen