When Stuck in Fog, Stick to the Basics

The Skipper Says: The bottom line in successful coastal navigation is to learn the basics and keep your systems simple. The hard way is to build your own confidence in a few crude pieces of gear. The guy who can navigate without spending $30,000 on electronics is far better off than the guy who does and expects them to get him where he wants to go. --Mike Pyzel of the Pyzel School of Navigation, Santa Barbara

Pyzel’s practical, no-nonsense advice on coastal navigation made me feel better about myself and my unsophisticated ways of navigating.

I don’t have any electronic gear aboard my sloop Herald Bird. I do have a battery-operated radio direction finder, so I can home in on coastal radio beacons, but I must confess I’ve only had to rely on it once in 10 years in a dense fog over the San Pedro Channel.

The smartest way of navigating in fog is not to venture out in it in the first place. I keep my radio direction finder’s eight little batteries up to snuff so I can listen to a wonderful radio station in Covina that plays nothing but music from my youth. Every now and then they come up with some old Jan Garber recordings from the era when Garber and his dance band played in the Casino at Avalon, Catalina Island. (I’m afraid I’m talking about the late 1930s.)

When they play Garber on my RDR while holed up in a Catalina cove or moored on a can in Avalon Bay, I wallow in pleasant nostalgia. The RDR is great for homing in on Covina. I simply can’t get Covina on my fixed radio at home.

So that, I suppose, is a form of coastal navigation that is rarely, if ever, disclosed in any navigation instruction. After all, it is a way of finding one’s course into the past before the invention of rock and roll.

Pyzel’s basics list includes proper charts, parallel rules, a divider, a compass, a cruising guide of the area and a depth meter. I qualify on all counts on my Bird except a depth meter. I still carry, and use occasionally, an old-fashioned lead line when I’m unsure of the bottom close to shore.

In addition, I made up a little mahogany box, with brass fittings, in which I mounted a small gimbaled compass. Two brass wires are in the box. I’ve only to push the wires into holes in the top edges of the box, one in front of the little compass and one to its rear and, lo, I have a handy little polaris for sighting at headlands or structures on shore. Thus, I can made pretty good triangulations to fix my vessel’s position on the chart.

At any rate, it’s prudent to have an extra compass on board, just in case a grandchild tosses the main compass overboard. I have a grandchild who almost did, but I stopped her in time. She was about 6 then and was fascinated by giving things the deep six and watching them sink.

Oh, yes, and I don’t bother converting my magnetic bearings to true. I just use the inner compass rose on my charts. It’s the simplest way to chart a course between here and any of the Channel Islands. I raised Santa Barbara Island, which is only about a mile square, on a misty day this way without any trouble. Of course, you must make some fairly shrewd estimates of windage and currents. A little local knowledge and experience helps in this respect.

And, finally, if you’re out of sight of land, owing to misty conditions, and, say, you’re trolling about hoping to hook a marlin, you’d better keep a crude record of compass direction, approximate speed and time on each course run. It helps mightily to know where you are when it comes time to head for home port. I overlooked this once and found myself well below Laguna Beach. It took a little while to orient myself. Now I carry plenty of pads and pencils aboard. My wife likes these to make grocery lists on.

Sailing Notes Hobie Alter, Jr., of Capistrano Beach edged top catamaran sailor Randy Smyth of Huntington Beach, in the final race of the First Hobie 17 U.S. National Championships to take the series title at La Jolla. Smyth, a sailmaker by trade, will be among those sailing in the Pacific 1000 marathon around Catalina Island and to other Southern California ports between San Diego and Santa Barbara. The Pacific 1000 will begin July 23 from Queenway Bay, where the Hilton Hotel is located, in Long Beach, and will end Aug. 3. The race is open to beach catamarans between 16 and 20 feet in length.

Capt. Robert A . Janecek is the new commanding officer of the Coast Guard Marine Safety Office Group, Los Angeles/Long Beach. He replaced Capt. Leon E. Beaudin, who retired. The State Regional Quality Control Board is studying a high degree of contamination by carcinogenic PCBs in the Rhine Channel of Newport Harbor. The Rhine Channel is located between the Lido Peninsula and Lido Village. PCBs were used in paint and electrical products before being banned. The study is attempting to determine if the chemical is the result of past contamination or an on-going problem.