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How to Navigate Fall if you’re a Sailor

Your Faithful author with his sextant

Well, fall is officially here. For Bay Area sailors, that means a little less wind, a little less daylight to enjoy on the water. It’s also means perhaps some time to think about how a sailing-obsessed person might satisfy his or her sailing jones as winter approaches. 

Here’s an idea. Brush up on navigation. 

If you haven’t yet, maybe consider the Coastal Navigation course. You’ll learn lots of stuff you can put to great use when spring comes — What direction to point your boat so that you sail a straight line even when crossing a tidal current, for example. Or how to tell exactly where you are using just a compass. Or the way to calculate tidal currents in an area you’re not familiar with.

The interesting thing about learning coastal navigation techniques is that you’ll actually discover how to get the most out of your GPS. Sailors who think they don’t need to study navigation because the GPS knows what to do are prone to accidental groundings, or worse.

If that interests you, Spinnaker has classes starting in November and in December. 

What else? 

Maybe you’ve been bitten by the nav bug and have already taken the Coastal Navigation class. Think about moving up to celestial navigation. Why? Two very good reasons: 

  1. Not to upset you, but GPS probably isn’t as reliable as you might think. The federal government runs a web site where users can report GPS outages, and there were a dozen such reports just in September. Also, what’s to say your own GPS unit is always going to work?
  2. The concepts in celestial navigation are truly interesting, both from a technical point of view, and from the perspective of nature and how our world works. There are people who tout the benefits of forest bathing — losing yourself for a moment in nature. I’d suggest there’s a similar benefit from star bathing via celestial nav.

Celestial navigation classes are offered by Spinnaker about once a year, and if there’s interest, a new class could be put on the calendar in the fall. As an American Sailing-affiliated club, Spinnaker proposes two versions of celestial navigation — a basic endorsement for fixing a rough position in an emergency, and a full certification to understand the whole process and gain competence and accuracy. Those who want just the basics attend the first three sessions of our class, those in for the full month complete six sessions.

Meanwhile, as a little introduction, I will be offering hands-on experiences on occasion from a site along San Francisco Bay where we can get good shots of the moon, stars and planets with the bay as a good horizon. Keep your eye on the Spinnaker newsletter for when the next session might be.