View Single Post
Old 07-21-11, 12:40 PM   #141
Sailor Steve
Eternal Patrol
 
Sailor Steve's Avatar
 
Join Date: Nov 2002
Location: High in the mountains of Utah
Posts: 50,369
Downloads: 745
Uploads: 249


Default

It is true. Using a good sextant and a good timepiece navigators have been travelling the seas with great accuracy for hundreds of years. There's nothing wrong with autonav and waypoints, until it gets cloudy or you submerge. Then you use dead reckoning, estimating your position by your speed and compass heading alone. When that happens you have no way of telling how fast the current is moving or in what direction, and the next time you can take a sighting you find out just how far of course you've gotten, which can be pretty far if you don't see the sun for a week.
__________________
“Never do anything you can't take back.”
—Rocky Russo
Sailor Steve is offline   Reply With Quote