Plotting Sheets
Whether you’re studying for an Ocean Navigator certificate or just interested in celestial navigation, you’ll be needing plotting sheets. The scale of oceanic paper charts against the width of a pencil point precludes accurate plotting on them, so blank charts that can plot sights anywhere the world over are used instead. A fix plotted on one of these blanks can then be transferred to the paper or electronic passage chart to monitor the day’s progress. Plotting sheets such as those issued by Weems & Plath have traditionally come in pads or packs. Their large size makes for clear plotting, and they remain the best available option. However, money must, of course, change hands. If you run out, are broke, or are otherwise disinclined to part with the hard-won dollar, printable A4-sized PDFs can be downloaded from starpath.com/downloads/UPS.pdf at the popular price.
Getting Grounded
Radar-assisted collisions continue despite all the sophistication of modern radar readouts, especially in fog. The biggest challenge for operators of yacht radar who don’t use the instrument every day is usually the important question of the aspect of a target. On a typical head-up display, this may not be what it seems. The best answer is still old-fashioned, pencil-powered radar plotting, but if this is outside your skill zone, a reliable fallback position when your brain is popping and your grip on reality is flying out the companionway is to go “ground stabilized.” Once your own motion is neutralized, all issues of relative motion vanish, and deciding where, if anywhere, the targets on your screen are headed is obvious. To achieve this state, all you have to do is take off way and lie still in relation to the seabed for a while. If there’s a useful buoy or lobster pot for reference, great. If there’s nothing on hand, you may have to compromise by arranging SOG to read zero or by holding station on a known immovable target such as this convenient navigation buoy (above) that is just within eyeball range in the poor visibility. As soon as you are ground stabilized, anything moving can be analyzed. Contacts that stay put are either attached to the seabed—buoys, or anchored ships perhaps—or they’re vessels doing the same as you. Anything moving is going more or less where it’s pointing.
