The term piloting means both with fixes on a chart and by eye:The same sort of task confronts any of us when, for example, we walk out of the back door of a theater onto an unfamiliar street. Which way am I facing? Where am I? The question is answered by establishing correspondences between the features of the environment and the features of some representation of that environment. When the navigator is satisfied that he has arrived at a coherent set of correspondences, he might look to the chart and say " Ah, yes; I am here,"
My question is how common is this ability, to be able to navigate this way. by eye, amongst mariners from different sectors?
In my experience, the ability to navigate (land or sea) “by eye” (or, if you prefer, “by the seat of your pants”) is to a great extent innate - that is, you’re born with it.
We have two daughters - the oldest is perennially lost without her phone giving her directions, and during a journey where she is not involved with navigation, has no idea where she is nor even which way she is travelling. Ask her which way is North, and she has no idea.
The younger showed complete orientation from a very early age - at 3 years old, riding in the back seat of our car taking her older sister to school, she instantly recognized changes in route and direction (and demanded to know why, of course! ) At the age of 8, she managed to navigate all the way from our home to my wife’s office (about 10 miles) on her bicycle. (and back)
The contrast between the two of them, in spite of very equal environments and exposures is striking - somewhere in the human genome, there is an orientation gene
Sadly, neither of them became mariners .
Obviously, the lack of this innate ability can be overcome through diligent effort and constant surveillance.
Yes, it has to be. Can’t be otherwise. It’s got to be the result of millions of years of evolution. In prehistoric times the ability to navigate would have been necessary for survival.
How can anyone NOT do this and not be a danger to themselves and others?
I guess if your abilities are “the pilot gets me away from land and the autopilot takes me to somewhere else where the pilot gets back on” you are OK until a fuse blows.
reminds me of Korean Airlines getting a visual approach into SFO and being so clueless as to actually operating the airplane vs. programming it they hit the seawall and wrecked the plane.
As I pointed out above, it can be done. My wife is about as non-natural a navigator as it gets (probably where my oldest daughter got the gene) - yet through diligence and effort, she does a very capable job of navigating us , including some tricky entrances and nasty currents, plus getting her 100T ticket. It isn’t easy for her, but she does it.
I don’t see why a professional mariner with intelligence and drive couldn’t do it, too.
Ironically, we have a group out on our training boat Curlew practicing this right now. A newly licensed mate and an AB planning to get his license soon. The instructors are two of our captains. Training waters: Salish Sea. Navigating and collision avoidance solely by eye and radar. No AIS. No plotter. 14 days of at-sea training. Best training ground is the San Juan Islands. Lots of blind turns. Lots of ferry traffic to avoid, as well as kayaks invisible to radar.
The main thing is to get watch standers used to operating by eye in close-quarters with land and other vessels
See if you can get them crewing on a sailboat race. A crowded start on a windy day is the ultimate in piloting by eye with clearances measured in inches.
The language acquisition part of the brain peaks out at about 8 years old. An infant 1-3 years old is not going to be good at acquiring language, neither is a 60 year old, but it’s easy and flows naturally for an 8 year old.
I suspect that the ability to navigate by eye is similar. A small boat fishermen’s kids that ride along or young kids in a yacht club sailing program, or some other small boat experience are going to develop the “innate” ability to navigate by eye.
An AB that starts on deck on his first boat in his 20s, and finally makes it into the wheelhouse in his 30s, will probably never learn to navigate by eye.
Surround a guy with electronics to do everything for him and he will never learn to navigate by eye. That’s fine until the antennas ice up and snap off, or there is a lightning strike, or during a severe thunderstorm, or green water takes out pilothouse windows and the electronics, or the Russians start jamming and spoofing, or the North Koreans accidentally set off an EMP, or some other calamity.
The most usual cause of loss of electronic is loss of power supply. The batteries are worn out and won’t take a charge once it gets cold, or the Constavolt or some wiring burns up.
Today, most navigators probably won’t ever face a loss of electronics calamity or have to do much more than follow the green line.
I’ve taken trainees out on these piloting training voyages. I remember distinctly the first such trip. Two trainees, both newly licensed mates. One guy burned through six cigarettes an hour on the first day. He was nervous as hell. But I could see he was learning quickly. The San Juan Islands and Gulf Islands were the training ground. They are nerve-wracking to pilot through.
By the third day he was burning a cigarette an hour. He had calmed down. He had learned the art. I could sit in the wheelhouse saying nothing, and watch him make every turn, and avoid every boat. Job done.
The other guy never picked it up. Was incapable. Spent much of his time on watch talking. Much if it about why all the training was useless. After the trip I told him he would not be sailing as a mate on our boats. Could sail as AB if he wanted. He quit.
Depends on the sector. One is generally a crutch for the other.
I’ve worked with a lot of older mariners that are unable to functionally use their navigational aids but have a developed enough sense of eye piloting to overcome it. Until they don’t.
I’ve also worked with older mariners that never developed it and can’t use electronics for shit and got by on bullshitting and luck.
Younger mariners learn to pilot by eye if someone makes them. People usually don’t. The ability to pilot by eye is often used as a reason it’s unnecessary to repair or use navigational aids effectively. People will go on for hours about lightning strikes or spoofing and other things they don’t know a damn thing about but when you ask them how often those things have occurred in their career vs how often someone got on the wrong side of a buoy they get real quiet and change the subject.
I wish people would stop repeating this. Kayaks, especially groups of kayaks, are easily visible on a properly tuned and ranged radar. They’re a common navigational hazard in the NW and learning how to detect them is important.
Generally in areas where kayaks are a potential navigational concern one radar will be set to very short range and very low sea clutter setting. Detecting kayaks this way takes practice, but once you know what you’re looking for it’s easy to do. This also applies to small unlit powerboats, floating debris, and other common inshore navigational hazards.
Visual detection is preferable, but the problem with relying on visual detection is you can find yourself in a very poor traffic situation and making emergency maneuvers that are going to freak out the ferry/tug/container ship you’re avoiding if you wait until you detect a group of overdue poorly lit if at all kayakers by visual means.
I hope your training crew is anchored up somewhere safe today!
I’m going to agree with everything you say, with perhaps one tiny cavil when it comes to kayaks. Even a crab-bag is visible to radar under the right conditions, but under the wrong conditions is not. A skin/wood frame kayak, as well as a SUP, are, under the wrong conditions, not going to be visible to radar, or perhaps to be more exact, difficult to interpret from radar clutter. This goes to it exactly:
So, as you say, the skill has to be developed.
We also operate a 17-foot long wooden boat (no motor) for a different sort of training. And I’m regularly shocked about how difficult it is to see her on radar beyond a quarter-mile away, even while actively looking for her with a brand-new radar. Her echo is so small that when sailing in May its noticeable that some logs have bigger returns. And yes, she hangs a radar reflector from the mast. Which is the reason why we sail her with an AIS transponder.
There’s two sperate questions here. The first is what specific tools should a deck officer use in any given situation? The answer to that is going to depend on the officers experience and judgement.
The second question is what tools should the deck officer develop competence in using?
It’s my view that the deck officer should develop both, the skills required to use instruments and those required for visual navigation and to maintain situational awareness.
I feel like I either am missing some hidden meaning or dropped into a parallel dimension.
I have taught numerous adults to sail and to fly airplanes, in no case would they have had even a chance of taking either one out unsupervised if they could not navigate by eye.
I’ll admit I haven’t been doing a lot of it lately, do we really have a GPS-crippled generation who literally can’t find their way around anymore without a screen?
I haven’t ever had a student that absolutely could not do this, but I have had a lot of resistance to what they saw as silly historical reenacting. “GPS will never fail”, “The battery will never go dead”, “My phone can do this”, etc. etc.
Like I said, I don’t do this as much as I used to, maybe there ARE people who are just lost without a screen to follow.
Sailing step 1 was getting students to quit looking 50 feet in front of the boat and not noticing they were turning.
Later on you get to forward AND aft bearings where currents rip sideways across a channel, just because you are aimed at the next mark doesn’t mean you are still in the channel.
There is a whole other area where someone learned to do this ONCE to get past a course requirement and has never done it again and is likely very very rusty at best.
(side note, airplanes use what are more or less range markers, but in a vertical plane for landing guidance, you don’t HAVE to always be looking inside)
A radar tuned to pick up plastic kayaks is going to look like a mess in any kind of weather, but I guess a lot fewer kayaks are out then. It would also depend on the age of the radar, the ones I used to work on back in the day were hard-pressed to pick up a Boston Whaler with a metal engine.
) At the age of 8, she managed to navigate all the way from our home to my wife’s office (about 10 miles) on her bicycle. (and back)
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