Beware those electronic aids to bad navigation.
I know a man who is an expert witness in those sad cases where a yacht worth half a million or more hits a reef or rock and the owner and insurer have diametrically different views on how the crash happened and who pays. You can learn a lot from life at the sharp end of sailing.
The owner points to the thousand pounds worth of top of the range chart plotter; to the screen at the helm and another at the navigation station; and the ten more on crew iPhones. This, plus the paper chart tidily stowed away in the chart table drawer, is surely proof that they had taken every step anyone can ask of them to know about the danger they actually, irrefutably, and with such major consequences, hit.
“Not exactly,” my man will say, regretfully siding with the insurer. “There is a reported danger on the paper chart but it is in very small writing and, as you say, you didn’t see it. There is a warning on your electronic charts but since they are vector charts this was not shown on the view you were using. It doesn’t matter how much you have spent on your electronic charts and chart plotters, a closer look at the paper chart, the kind of look you would have given it if it were your only guide to what was out there, would have shown that you were standing on towards an underwater danger. You hit it. It’s your fault.”
Raster and vector charts are generally accurate and reliable but: vector charts often show less information than the raster chart; information on the raster chart may not be readable at extremes of zooming in or out. There are pros and cons and each have their different appeal. The point is: beware of using electronic navigation unthinkingly. They are wonderful but they do not release you from personally navigating safely.
AIS is the bees knees. I have no hesitation in saying that. Using it in 2017 when I crewed two-up from Portugal to the Azores, AIS was a revelation. I hadn’t realised how many ships are criss-crossing that apparently empty ocean.
When I first crossed the Atlantic to the Caribbean in the early 1990s AIS wasn’t invented. We lived by the guidance of an earlier generation of small boat, blue water sailors, who mainly tucked themselves up in bed when it got dark and started life again when dawn broke. We of course didn’t do that, but that was only because we had a huge fright and a very near miss with a deep-sea fishing boat a few hundred miles off the Cape Verde islands that changed my plan to do just that. After the fright we kept night watches punctiliously. But when I came to write this up in ‘Your First Atlantic Crossing’ I observed that we only saw ships at night because of their lights and during the day we didn’t see any. So from our day-time experience we might well have chosen not to bother looking for shipping that wasn’t out there; and the night time experience of being able to see ships farther off would be lost on us snorers because we wouldn’t have been up there looking. And when we arrived in Trinidad on the other side we would have said there was no need to keep watch in deep ocean because there was nothing out there. Or, with a little less luck, we wouldn’t have anything to say because we wouldn’t have arrived at all.
In ‘Your First Atlantic Crossing’ I advised keeping night watches on the grounds that the big ships won't be looking out for you, so you better look out for yourself. But I didn’t realise at that time, not till I sailed with AIS, how essential this was.
Sailing from Portugal to the Azores there were times when we had a dozen AIS targets on screen but couldn’t see any of them from the cockpit, day or night. We didn’t have many close encounters but one of the few could have been our last. I picked up a huge, fully laden container ship on AIS when it was twenty miles away (about an hour and a half to impact) and tracked it as it closed with us. We radioed it when we were about five miles apart (fifteen to twenty minutes to impact) to be assured that they knew we were there and that they would go round our stern. When I knew the ship was within sight I kept a visual watch from the cockpit in the direction I knew it would come at us. I stared relentlessly without seeing anything until I figured that the ship could not be more than one mile away. I went down to the AIS screen to assure myself that the ship existed, then back up to look for it. I would have sworn that I could see all the way to the far horizon but this ship nearby remained invisible. When it came out of low sun-lit cloud it was only half a mile away or so close to impact that you needed a stop watch to time it.
I can all too easily imagine my panic and confusion if the first I had known of that ship was its huge bows only minutes away from hitting us. And, worse, what if I, up there on a routine watch, seeing nothing, popped below to put the kettle on just two seconds before the monster came out of the cloud? I would have lit the gas under the kettle with a carefree whistle and song, absolutely sure from my careful scanning of the horizon that the sea all around was safely empty.
So let us all celebrate AIS - the bees knees for short handed sailors out on that not-so-empty ocean - but nothing comes without a downside. I observed some ways in which AIS made for bad navigation practice.
On that ten day crossing to the Azores old habits meant spending lots of time in the cockpit on look out. The screen below was my first reserve, even though it was probably giving me more information than my looking outs. But I was aware that some vessels (my own boat, if I had been out there on it) might not be transmitting AIS signals and yet might still be in our path. We met a non-transmitting boat on day four when we motored up to a becalmed yacht right on the nose, an hour or two after dawn, coming close enough to shout across for a chat. From the events of that meeting I realised that AIS had a grip on me that I didn’t like. I first saw the yacht when it was a long way off and yet I went below to check its existence on the AIS screen. It wasn’t on the screen so I went back up to see if there really was a yacht ahead of us. And when I saw there was I went below again to stare harder and zoom in on the screen. AIS, not my own eyes, had become my check on reality. That was when I became worried that my shipmate hardly bothered going into the cockpit on his night watches. He spent most of his time in front of the chart plotter looking at the AIS targets. He was right - up to a point - but my expert witness friend would have fingered him as culpable for not keeping a proper watch if we had hit something – and survived.
It wasn’t just my shipmate. I too sat at the screen greedy for what it was feeding me. Time at a screen passes more quickly that you realise. I know it passes quickly when I’m working at my computer. I know it passes quickly for my grandchildren who plead that their half hour allocation on the iPad isn’t up yet when the clock shows they have just hit the fifty minute mark. The AIS chart plotter screen was sooo sooo soporific. I couldn’t take my eyes off it yet nothing was happening to keep my brain alert. A detective thriller on the screen would have kept me awake all night but out here, three hundred miles from the nearest land, that single line and some slow moving dots was hypnotic. Whenever I realised that I was nodding off I would force my unwilling body to quit the chair and go up top into wakeful fresh air. Sometimes I had to have a hell of an argument with my lethargic self, and I didn’t always win. What does that tell you about electronic aids to navigation?
My shipmate on the Azores trip is a very experienced sailor who routinely sails single-handed and I learnt a lot from him about the use and value of today’s electronic aids. This did not stop me wondering whether and how the reliance on electronics gets in the way of old-fashioned seamanship.
Here is my third observation: reliance on chart plotters and AIS may diminish our interest in the outside world and not just because screens become addictive or become the new reality, but because they can affect our ability to register the vital marks that old sailors registered almost as second nature.
We had come into Ponta Delgada, the largest Azorean harbour, and spent some days there before leaving. By the time we left I thought we were both pretty familiar with the layout and knew the way from harbour entrance to the inner pontoons. So when we came back a week later, at night, after a bit of a fright from a katabatic wind that nearly broached us along that high coast, I thought the worst was over as we came through the entrance and turned for the pontoons about half a mile away. Why were we not heading in the right direction, I wondered? I took to making a cheery running commentary about the fuel dock to starboard, the cranes on the wharf to port and the lights on the launch heading our way, because I sensed that my shipmate on the helm was confused by the layout, the bright lights and his memory. Later I wondered how much he remembered of this harbour and how dependent he had become on finding his way electronically. I knew he had not paid much attention to the harbour when we had left because we were busy hoisting sail and checking the electronics. For me, doing all that did not mean ignoring the harbour. I expected to be coming back and I wanted the layout clear in my mind. Not yet used to a full set of electronic aids my sense of survival means I observe everything I can about a harbour I’ll be coming back to.
Which takes me back to the first point. Electronics is a truly wonderful gift to the sailor but only when used with thought and within its limits:
* Whether your chart plotter uses raster or vector charts, take extra care when passage planning to check for dangers.
* AIS tells you a lot about the ships around you, but never does away with the need to take your own look around.
* Don’t get so reliant on screens that you don’t pay enough attention to the real world that you can see.
© Les Weatheritt
I know a man who is an expert witness in those sad cases where a yacht worth half a million or more hits a reef or rock and the owner and insurer have diametrically different views on how the crash happened and who pays. You can learn a lot from life at the sharp end of sailing.
The owner points to the thousand pounds worth of top of the range chart plotter; to the screen at the helm and another at the navigation station; and the ten more on crew iPhones. This, plus the paper chart tidily stowed away in the chart table drawer, is surely proof that they had taken every step anyone can ask of them to know about the danger they actually, irrefutably, and with such major consequences, hit.
“Not exactly,” my man will say, regretfully siding with the insurer. “There is a reported danger on the paper chart but it is in very small writing and, as you say, you didn’t see it. There is a warning on your electronic charts but since they are vector charts this was not shown on the view you were using. It doesn’t matter how much you have spent on your electronic charts and chart plotters, a closer look at the paper chart, the kind of look you would have given it if it were your only guide to what was out there, would have shown that you were standing on towards an underwater danger. You hit it. It’s your fault.”
Raster and vector charts are generally accurate and reliable but: vector charts often show less information than the raster chart; information on the raster chart may not be readable at extremes of zooming in or out. There are pros and cons and each have their different appeal. The point is: beware of using electronic navigation unthinkingly. They are wonderful but they do not release you from personally navigating safely.
AIS is the bees knees. I have no hesitation in saying that. Using it in 2017 when I crewed two-up from Portugal to the Azores, AIS was a revelation. I hadn’t realised how many ships are criss-crossing that apparently empty ocean.
When I first crossed the Atlantic to the Caribbean in the early 1990s AIS wasn’t invented. We lived by the guidance of an earlier generation of small boat, blue water sailors, who mainly tucked themselves up in bed when it got dark and started life again when dawn broke. We of course didn’t do that, but that was only because we had a huge fright and a very near miss with a deep-sea fishing boat a few hundred miles off the Cape Verde islands that changed my plan to do just that. After the fright we kept night watches punctiliously. But when I came to write this up in ‘Your First Atlantic Crossing’ I observed that we only saw ships at night because of their lights and during the day we didn’t see any. So from our day-time experience we might well have chosen not to bother looking for shipping that wasn’t out there; and the night time experience of being able to see ships farther off would be lost on us snorers because we wouldn’t have been up there looking. And when we arrived in Trinidad on the other side we would have said there was no need to keep watch in deep ocean because there was nothing out there. Or, with a little less luck, we wouldn’t have anything to say because we wouldn’t have arrived at all.
In ‘Your First Atlantic Crossing’ I advised keeping night watches on the grounds that the big ships won't be looking out for you, so you better look out for yourself. But I didn’t realise at that time, not till I sailed with AIS, how essential this was.
Sailing from Portugal to the Azores there were times when we had a dozen AIS targets on screen but couldn’t see any of them from the cockpit, day or night. We didn’t have many close encounters but one of the few could have been our last. I picked up a huge, fully laden container ship on AIS when it was twenty miles away (about an hour and a half to impact) and tracked it as it closed with us. We radioed it when we were about five miles apart (fifteen to twenty minutes to impact) to be assured that they knew we were there and that they would go round our stern. When I knew the ship was within sight I kept a visual watch from the cockpit in the direction I knew it would come at us. I stared relentlessly without seeing anything until I figured that the ship could not be more than one mile away. I went down to the AIS screen to assure myself that the ship existed, then back up to look for it. I would have sworn that I could see all the way to the far horizon but this ship nearby remained invisible. When it came out of low sun-lit cloud it was only half a mile away or so close to impact that you needed a stop watch to time it.
I can all too easily imagine my panic and confusion if the first I had known of that ship was its huge bows only minutes away from hitting us. And, worse, what if I, up there on a routine watch, seeing nothing, popped below to put the kettle on just two seconds before the monster came out of the cloud? I would have lit the gas under the kettle with a carefree whistle and song, absolutely sure from my careful scanning of the horizon that the sea all around was safely empty.
So let us all celebrate AIS - the bees knees for short handed sailors out on that not-so-empty ocean - but nothing comes without a downside. I observed some ways in which AIS made for bad navigation practice.
On that ten day crossing to the Azores old habits meant spending lots of time in the cockpit on look out. The screen below was my first reserve, even though it was probably giving me more information than my looking outs. But I was aware that some vessels (my own boat, if I had been out there on it) might not be transmitting AIS signals and yet might still be in our path. We met a non-transmitting boat on day four when we motored up to a becalmed yacht right on the nose, an hour or two after dawn, coming close enough to shout across for a chat. From the events of that meeting I realised that AIS had a grip on me that I didn’t like. I first saw the yacht when it was a long way off and yet I went below to check its existence on the AIS screen. It wasn’t on the screen so I went back up to see if there really was a yacht ahead of us. And when I saw there was I went below again to stare harder and zoom in on the screen. AIS, not my own eyes, had become my check on reality. That was when I became worried that my shipmate hardly bothered going into the cockpit on his night watches. He spent most of his time in front of the chart plotter looking at the AIS targets. He was right - up to a point - but my expert witness friend would have fingered him as culpable for not keeping a proper watch if we had hit something – and survived.
It wasn’t just my shipmate. I too sat at the screen greedy for what it was feeding me. Time at a screen passes more quickly that you realise. I know it passes quickly when I’m working at my computer. I know it passes quickly for my grandchildren who plead that their half hour allocation on the iPad isn’t up yet when the clock shows they have just hit the fifty minute mark. The AIS chart plotter screen was sooo sooo soporific. I couldn’t take my eyes off it yet nothing was happening to keep my brain alert. A detective thriller on the screen would have kept me awake all night but out here, three hundred miles from the nearest land, that single line and some slow moving dots was hypnotic. Whenever I realised that I was nodding off I would force my unwilling body to quit the chair and go up top into wakeful fresh air. Sometimes I had to have a hell of an argument with my lethargic self, and I didn’t always win. What does that tell you about electronic aids to navigation?
My shipmate on the Azores trip is a very experienced sailor who routinely sails single-handed and I learnt a lot from him about the use and value of today’s electronic aids. This did not stop me wondering whether and how the reliance on electronics gets in the way of old-fashioned seamanship.
Here is my third observation: reliance on chart plotters and AIS may diminish our interest in the outside world and not just because screens become addictive or become the new reality, but because they can affect our ability to register the vital marks that old sailors registered almost as second nature.
We had come into Ponta Delgada, the largest Azorean harbour, and spent some days there before leaving. By the time we left I thought we were both pretty familiar with the layout and knew the way from harbour entrance to the inner pontoons. So when we came back a week later, at night, after a bit of a fright from a katabatic wind that nearly broached us along that high coast, I thought the worst was over as we came through the entrance and turned for the pontoons about half a mile away. Why were we not heading in the right direction, I wondered? I took to making a cheery running commentary about the fuel dock to starboard, the cranes on the wharf to port and the lights on the launch heading our way, because I sensed that my shipmate on the helm was confused by the layout, the bright lights and his memory. Later I wondered how much he remembered of this harbour and how dependent he had become on finding his way electronically. I knew he had not paid much attention to the harbour when we had left because we were busy hoisting sail and checking the electronics. For me, doing all that did not mean ignoring the harbour. I expected to be coming back and I wanted the layout clear in my mind. Not yet used to a full set of electronic aids my sense of survival means I observe everything I can about a harbour I’ll be coming back to.
Which takes me back to the first point. Electronics is a truly wonderful gift to the sailor but only when used with thought and within its limits:
* Whether your chart plotter uses raster or vector charts, take extra care when passage planning to check for dangers.
* AIS tells you a lot about the ships around you, but never does away with the need to take your own look around.
* Don’t get so reliant on screens that you don’t pay enough attention to the real world that you can see.
© Les Weatheritt
