Navigation

John, inspired by a near miss, shares vital tips to avoid a collision in fog.

Drones and mast cameras, can they be useful for navigation? Matt says yes. We also want to hear about your experiences with this intriguing technology.

John’s recommendation for the best computer to run Windows-based navigation software may surprise you, but it makes sense.

I can’t imagine that there are many sailors out there who don’t share John’s and my fascination with lighthouses—walking around them, climbing them, photographing them, reading about what it was like to take care of them—we don’t seem to tire of it. However, in Canada, the USA and the UK, and I’m sure in other [...]

In these days of hyper-accurate GPS navigation and deck mounted plotters, it can sometimes seem like navigation has been reduced to no more than a video game. And it sometimes seems that more and more people are implicitly trusting what they see on a screen, having never known the nervous twitch that accompanied entering a [...]

Question: Do you still do sights with a sextant? If so, where do you get the time signal from when underway? I found several shortwave frequencies for time signals on the web but the reception is extremely poor. In fact, I can’t get any useful exact time at all with my SSB receiver (Lowe HF-150 [...]

Question: Do you use a magnetic compass to augment your navigation process? Answer: Yes, we do. We have a large Ritchie compass mounted on top of our binnacle. Despite having two flux gate compasses (it’s a long story why two) we like to check the course with the magnetic compass, which we treat as the [...]

Question: I read your article, “Knowing Where You Are“, in January’s Cruising World magazine and was wondering if I could see a copy of your custom log book page. Answer: Note that the blank column can be used for whatever you wish; we usually use it for recording water temperature, both when crossing the Gulf [...]