When out at sea, the most valuable piece of equipment on a yacht today is probably the GPS Chart Plotter, not the Compass.
GPS will give you your exact position with a range of error of a few feet! The GPS antenna on our AIS is so accurate that during installation it asks for the exact position of the antenna on the yacht to know the true space that the vessel occupies on the surface of the ocean!
GPS started off wonderful, a small screen would display your exact coordinates on the Earth. You no longer need a sextant to find your rough position and Dead Reckoning just became very obsolete! The readout lets you quickly know precisely where you are so you can plot them on a paper chart and figure out where you should go next.
Then someone thought about how they could make it even easier to do! Paper charts are big and cumbersome, so this was the next point to improve upon! GPS displays grew bigger and bigger to the point that maps could be visible on them, and eventually charts could be displayed on their screens. Now your position is instantly plotted on the screen in real time right before your eyes!
Navigating transformed from an art that takes practice to a video game where you steer your little boat shaped icon around on a screen. Avoiding rocks, buoys, and day markers suddenly became possible, even in the darkness of night or the blinding effects of thick fog. This is great for stationary objects that don’t move, but what about other boats on the same waterway?
AIS makes this possible, and even better it plots the other boats on your screen! Suddenly, sailing became a video game where you can steer blindly in any conditions, all you have to do is avoid the other dots on the screen!
This all sounds rather fantastical, but the sad thing is while we were in the Azores, I met another cruiser who luckily arrived after having some technical issues with one of his motors (on his catamaran). This cruiser carried no paper charts, only chart plotters. These large screens were very apparent in his cockpit area. When off they were huge black rectangles and when on they could serve as a flashlight!
The alarming part is he did not carry a compass.
If his electronics failed or if his ability to power electronics ran out, he had no paper charts to plot his position and calculate his course or to navigate by, and even worse, he had no compass to guide him.
Technology is awesome and it has made it possible for us to sail into completely unknown ports for the first time with confidence that we will safely anchor without bumping into anything! That doesn’t mean that technology should be revered above the tried and true simple tools of the past, like a compass.
