Stay on course with electronic charts

by Bill Morris Staying on course under sail, particularly within 100 miles of any coast, is a lot easier with a modern, GPS-controlled chartplotter. With the latest generation of chartplotters, you can navigate to virtually any point on the world’s oceans while staying on course and out of harm’s way. To start off, there are two types of digital charts: raster and vector. Raster charts are digitalized copies of paper charts, such as those published by NOAA and the British Admiralty. On the other hand, vector charts are purely digital, capable of changing the amount of chart detail depending on…
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Log books

The first thing I ordered when I purchased my boat were two log books: a general log and a maintenance log. The general log book is where I record the underway activity of my boat. A short afternoon sail will get one log entry when I return to the dock, but an extended distance sail like a race around an island may get entries every few hours. My maintenance log is where I record all maintenance and repair activity. In the front, I record chronologically the work done and the related cost. This could mean replacing a turnbuckle or having…
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Ocean Navigator sponsors the Transpac

Ocean Navigator sponsors the Transpac

This July is the 51st running of the Transpac Race, the signature west coast offshore race, 2,225 miles from Los Angeles to Honolulu. And for this running of the race, Ocean Navigator is an official race sponsor. The seamanship, navigation, route planning and watchstanding efforts exhibited by the race crews are the same skills that voyaging sailors undertake every day in their passages. This makes ON’s sponsorship of the Transpac an excellent match.   The race, run every two years, began in 1906 and was hosted by the Los Angeles Yacht Club. The current host of the race is the…
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Better than an atomic clock

Better than an atomic clock

An essential element for navigation is time. For navigation via celestial observations, you need to know your time down to the second. When we get into electronic navigation systems like GPS, second-level accuracy is not good enough. For that application, we need to start adding prefixes like milli-, micro- and nano- to seconds. The better we know time, the more accurate the navigation solution will be. And now the scientists and engineers are devising a new type of timepiece, called a nuclear clock, that will be the ultimate timepiece.  One of the great stories in the history of navigation was…
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