Quote:
Originally Posted by Hatterasguy
Its called death by GPS, happens in the marine world somewhat often.
People forget that charts can be wrong, heck in some parts of the country/world they are still using British Admiralty charts from the 18th century. Those are just scanned into the chips; so the 300 year old British charts may not show oh a jetty was the built in the 30's. So your latest model Raymarine chart plotter will plot you right over it.
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Most clowns on the water have no idea how to use a chart, compass and stopwatch for navigation. Although I thought it was ridiculous at the time, I'm glad my father "forced" me to learn to navigate that way. He's been all up and down the east coast with those 3 items (plus ears to listen for buoy bells/whistles/horns/lighthouse signals) in all conditions including 10' visibility fog (I was "lucky" enough to be put on bow watch in those condition with the airhorn going off every minute in my ear
).
Even after he got Loran then GPS and radar, he'd plot every trip on the chart first and use the electronics strictly as a tracking aid. Lots of folks used to give him grief about being anal retentive. Those same folks were often seen veering off the correct course because their white boxes told them to only to perform major corrections once they realized things didn't look right, which was when they realized my father wasn't following them.
