Always found these pretty useful when I was teaching.
That was happening in the Eastern Mediterranean this summer. You almost never had any correct GPS signal, you had to DR until you could pick up a terrestrial fix.
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Back to the old days than.
They still exist. Also the cheap PAPI, the Plywood Aproach Path Indicator. The best of all is the OLS, Optical Landing System, found on aircraft carriers and certain land airports that Navy pilots use to practice.
All this stuff will take a sailor 10 seconds to figure out, it is varieties of range markers or red zones on lighthouses turned sideways for vertical guidance.
The older daughter struggles with spatial awareness and relies heavily on technology for directions. The younger daughter, on the other hand, exhibits a natural sense of direction from a young age. This difference might be genetic, highlighting the possibility of an âorientation gene.â Despite the younger daughterâs potential, neither of them pursued a career in navigation.
I think this is right, if mariners donât practice they will not learn, or at least they learn very slowly.
Itâs spatial memory and itâs the reason people donât bang into the sides when they walk through a door.
If a mariner makes a habit of actively observing the vesselâs relative positions, how landmarks line up with each other and the vessels position they will build a mental map. Eventually the process, that of building the map and also using the map when transiting familiar areas will become almost automatic.
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Canât remember learning to navigate âby eyeâ watching my father probably. Running my own boat about 12 years old always referred to the compass. Later taking quick sights off nav aids. Nothing fancy just watching angles and how they changed. One thing my dad aways noted was ânatural line of positionâ when the boat was 90 degrees off an identified object we had to be on line.
Later out of high school working on a USCE survey boat learned more formal plotting methods and some not so formal. Captain was an old timer watching him learned about drift, wind or tide, importance of back sights and fixing position two methods to catch errors. He constantly used the depth sounder to confirm positions with varying depth.
Later in the CG on a WMEC was a Seaman then Boatswain mate. Under way ODâs LT. Ensign & Chief Boatswains Mate. Quartermaster plotted. Watching them saw big differences how they navigated. Some just school trained were good not all. The on the job experienced very good. No substitute for time and experience underway. Selection process more senior officers or enlisted weeds out the guys that donât get it.
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Nothing like beating up a tidal estuary with a 4 metre rise and fall and a draft of 2.3 metres without a buoyed channel to exercise the MK. 1 eyeball. Back then something that showed your position on a screen belonged to Buck Rodgers.
An ECDIS is a very useful tool to verify shipâs position when navigation by eye is being used as the primary method. Itâs far superior to plotting as that required having to interrupt a constant visual observation.
Before ECDIS (or ECS) verifying shipâs position required the deck officer to perform position fixing which required pausing to take and plot ranges / bearings. This process interrupted the flow of the visual information and required reloading short term memory when returning to visual observations.
An ECDIS/ENC allows the navigator to quickly verify visual observations or to quickly orient oneâs self when in unfamiliar waters.
The issue of course officer who relies solely upon the electronic aids may never become proficient with navigation by eye and will suffer from reduced situational awareness.
GPS-crippled? Iâm afraid so. Iâm 75 and growing up my father always had âservice stationâ maps and I loved to look at them and plan trips or find out where some good place to visit was. These days, a map is a video on a four-inch screen. In my travels as a disaster relief responder, every time I cross a state line, I stop at the visitorâs center and pick up a map, even though most of my navigation is by GPS. (Try to find an âaddressâ when all the street signs and mailboxes or even houses with a house number was blown away by an F5 tornado).
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This is why before ECDIS the navy divided the job in two. The navigating officer stood at the Con with his notebook using all visual references and ranges and the OOW plotted the position. In addition in the CIC the blind pilotage team using the passage plan as drawn up by the navigator to follow the shipâs path.
The USN does it differently but we never had the helmsman or other wheelhouse personnel on the bridge except on minesweepers or smaller vessels.
Submarines making a coastal passage were done by the OOW using a notebook and calling down bearings at night. The radar plot rating, leading rate or petty officer plotted the bearings in the control room and reported progress to the OOW who had to maintain a picture of the chart while being drenched with spray on the conning tower.
This was back when submarines were semi furnished sewer pipes and everything stank of diesel.
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To paraphrase Mark Twain, he described river piloting the same as a person able to walk through his house in the dark without bumping into a table or foot stool.
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Maintaining oneâs skills definitely takes an effort. I grew up in narrow and dangerous channels with the chart and dividers on the table and a radar finely tuned. Stick your face in the smelly rubber hole and get some ranges off of your favorite rocks and points of land. Offshore, it was Loran until we could seed the beach on radar again.
Now, itâs GPS and plotters and ECDIS and AIS, and all that stuff is absolutely better. It shows me what the current and/or wind is doing to me way before I could ever detect it on radar or by eye. But, all of our systems support and confirm each other, a good sailor will always have a backup in his/her mind. Just like you need to have a bailout plan in your back pocket while making a landing, Iâve always urged my people to do their own failure scenarios in their heads. Whatâs the backup plan if box âXâ fails? Too many youngsters tend to go blank when the screens go dark. They (and I) need to constantly refresh the knowledge that we have backups, and how to use them with confidence.
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This was also my experience as a QM in the CG (went to Navy QM A school).
The QM maintained the navigation plot and the officer who had the conn stayed forward. I donât recall an officer ever going to the chart table to have a look at the chart except while under special sea and anchor detail. In that case the shipâs navigator, who was an officer, would take over the plot. But the separation between plot and conn remained.
Now, with ECDIS the watch officer more or less continuously monitors the ECDIS and ARPA and leaves the visual lookout to the AB.
How does that make sense?
An interesting discussion KC.
I piloted for 16 years with only visual references and as a result of this one inherently developed both good situational awareness allied with acute visual skills.
Then PPU and ECDIS presented themselves and I was a great advocate for their introduction. What surprised me is how quickly my visual skills were devolved to the new technology. The other surprise was that the new technology altered my safety envelopeâŚI swung closer to berths and swung in far tighter locations. We employed an RTK correction station which provided both high accuracy and reliability.
Unfortunately the visual skills were compromised.
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The Canadian Navy does all its initial officer training and advanced nav training in the SJIs, SGI and Desolation Sound for exactly this reason, its a fantastic training area
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ECDIS as a Situational Awarness and nav support tool is fantastic for the reasons youâve pointed out. The only way to ensure someone gains those visual skills, is to take away the tools when its safe to do so until the student/working mate is comfortable and proficient.
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Yes, I agree. Thereâs an interplay between what tools are used/available and how a task is approached.
Hutchins goes on in that paragraph to mention position fixing (the book was written in 1995).
We feel that we have achieved a reconciliation between the features we see in our world and a representation of that world. Things are not out of place. They are where we expect them to be. But now suppose someone asks a navigator " How far are we from the town at the head of that bay? " To answer that question, simply having a good sense of the correspondences between what one sees and what is depicted on some representation of the local space is not enough. Now more precision is required. To answer that question the navigator needs to have a more exact determination of where he is. In particular, he needs to have a sense of his location on a representation of space in a form that will permit him to compute the answer to the question. This is position fixing.
Itâs better to have more tools available than fewer, as Hutchins points out sometimes more precision is required. In many cases the electronic aids can be both more precise and more efficient.
Indeed.
The combination of GPS position fixing allied with accurate electronic charting has been an absolute game changer.
In my profession visual skills alone did not provide sufficient information or reassurance to my customerâŚ.the vesselâs Master. He/she was ultimately responsible for the safe navigation of their vessel but rarely possessed or appreciated the same visual skills which in itself created a void.
Then along came his/hers ECDIS along with my PPU and the improvement in situational awareness on both sides was exponential. Those professionals amongst us would appreciate and understand that development.
This also raised challenges when training new Pilots. They saw the advantages and simplicity of electronic navigation yet the challenge was to divest them from this technology until such time that it could be proven, via routine checks, that they had indeed developed visual navigation skills for the particular port.
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Yes, well said. When one loses situational awareness itâs replaced with anxiety. When an inexperienced deck officer attempts to switch from the ECDIS to visual they immediately feel raising anxiety.
Better to ease them into the shallow end. As has been mentioned the navy solves this problem by splitting the conning / plotting tasks. On the commercial side itâs BRM.
EDIT: Speaking of anxiety, I recall on my first trip as mate on an Aleutian freighter. I was northbound in this section, at night, trying to navigate while also trying to find the next call-in point. Victoria traffic requested I call them at 'Sink" Island but I couldnât find it on the chart.
After I bit I gave up looking on the chart and instead just called in at the same location the other vessels were calling.
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