How we navigate

I know this will be a big snooze for most people, but I know at least a couple of you who might think it's cool! So, this is what things look like in the pilot house, kind of:

That’s the helm down in the bottom left, but all our little digi navigation gadgets are to the right. Here’s the rundown, left to right:

GPS. Tells us how fast we ‘re going and feeds our location into the digital navigation system.

Radar. The sensor is mounted to the top of the pilot house. It goes around and around and tells us if there’s anything over the water within a certain range.

Autopilot.  Turns the rudder to keep us on a course with its different magnetic compass, which is under the pilot seat. You adjust the direction with a little knob. That’s what we use most of the time, when we’re not steering through narrow passages, strong currents, or heavy traffic. Solved mystery of the week: Sometimes when Dan stands right next to the pilot seat the whole boat swings in one direction or another, and yesterday we discovered it’s because his pocket knife is slightly magnetized, confusing the autopilot’s compass.

Depth Sounder.

Radio. SB radio, specifically, which is what the coast guard uses. There’s another radio—a UHF—straight ahead and down a little bit. That one’s more for informal communication, apparently? I don't know the protocol yet and I'm a little scared to use it, so when I'm steering I just hope we won't get hailed. Occasionally a little kid will come on, messing with it, and then the coast guard will come on a few minutes later and remind everyone that there are strict rules about radio communication. And sometimes someone will sit on their mike and it'll buzz static every few seconds until they get up.

And finally, down to the right, is our digital chart. The software quilts all the charts we have at different scales so zooming in and out and panning around is really easy. The computer is hooked up to our GPS, to the wind meter (that has a special name too), and predicted tide and current information. So, we can see our position on the chart and look at what conditions are along our course.

That’s it!

A lot of this technology is still pretty new—digital charts like this haven’t been around too long, and neither has GPS. It makes life pretty easy! Sometimes I try to look at the chart and see if I can navigate without the GPS, and it’s hard! It’s amazing how much one island can look like all the others. Maybe Dan and Kathy will be willing to have an analog-only day where we use paper charts and turn off the GPS…