This Boat Rat’s Tip of the Week is brought to you by Captain John of www.skippertips.com.
Have you ever noticed how new sailing crew struggle to “keep the course” after only 2 to 3 minutes at the wheel or tiller? Did you know that there’s a much easier, more accurate method? Learn the sailboat cruising secrets used by the pros on deliveries and long distance voyaging.
Can you imagine driving your car down the highway with your eyes glued to the speedometer? No one does this. Instead, you use a natural, built-in “judgment-meter” to know when to accelerate or decelerate. Once in a while, you glance at the speedometer to fine tune your progress.
Use this same principal with pick-a-point (P.A.P.) steering. Follow one of these three methods based on whether you sail in inland waters, along the coast or across an ocean, or during nighttime. Reduce crew fatigue and increase your sailing navigation accuracy when you use P.A.P. steering techniques. Reduce crew fatigue and increase your sailing navigation accuracy when you use P.A.P. steering techniques.
Inland P.A.P. Steering
1. Steady up onto your compass course with the steering compass.
2. Glance ahead, pick a distant object, and steer on it. Superimpose the object against some fixed part of your small cruising boat (mast, stay, shroud, pulpit, stanchion).
3. Check your steering compass every 30-45 seconds. A quick glance should be enough. Repeat steps 1 and 2 to fine tune your heading.
Coastal or Ocean P.A.P. Steering
1. Steady up onto your compass course with the steering compass. In seas, average your course above and below the sailing course (see related article link below). This causes less fatigue.
2. Pick a distant irregular land point if steering toward shore. This might be a hump, gap, or peak in a tree line, group of hills, cliffs, or mountain range. Line up a fixed object with a cloud at sea. Shift to a new cloud or group of clouds often. If clouds are absent, maintain a constant angle with wind-blown whitecaps, use shroud telltales, or feel the wind on your face. All of these methods help when you are out of sight of land.
3. Check your steering compass every 30-45 seconds. If you average your course, remember that you must keep an eye on your watch for accuracy.
Nighttime P.A.P. Steering
1. Steady up on your compass course, or use the course averaging method described in the related article link below.
2. Pick a star high up off of the horizon. Select a celestial body near the top of its arc. These stars move slower than those closer to your horizon. The exception are stars near the equator; they rise and set in a vertical motion. Place the star along your boat’s mast, stay or shroud.
3. Check your compass every 30 to 45 seconds. Take care not to get lulled into following a star across the ocean! Keep away from planets (they look like steady lights without the “twinkle” that stars have). Planets move much too fast across the sky for steering accuracy.
As a sailing skipper, always be on the lookout for new ways to make your sailing crew’s life easier. Add pick-a-point steering to your sailboat cruising chest of knowledge to save energy and reduce eye-strain fatigue.
As an amateur astronomer and sometimes off-shore sailor, I was curious about the recommendation never to use planets as steering points. So I went and checked the relative speeds of the naked eye planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) against the fixed stars.
Mercury and Venus are probably not useful because they’re always close to the sun or horizon and hence never good candidates, anyway, so we’ll ignore them.
Mars, which has the fastest relative movement rate of the three remaining, at its fastest moves approximately .75 degrees of arc a day (calculated from 10 days to go about half an hour of right ascension, which equals 7.5 degrees of arc; data from the position chart at http://www.nakedeyeplanets.com/mars.htm). Over the course of one 12-hour night watch, that would then be .375 degrees of arc; for comparison, the full moon subtends about .5 degree. The other two planets move much slower: Jupiter takes nearly 30 days to move the same amount, Saturn takes nearly 3 months.
It doesn’t seem to me that such a small nightly movement, even for Mars, would in fact pull you appreciably off course (any more so than following *any* star for too long), though with Mars you might have to be a bit careful. And the planets are generally so much brighter than everything else that they’re pretty visible even in light clouds – making Jupiter and Saturn, it seems to me, potentially useful sights.
Or am I missing something?
(It’s left as an exercise to the navigator to be able to tell which planet is which… anyone relying on the sky at night for guidance should be able to figure that out, no?)
Hi Anne, you have some interesting points. Many folks are not familiar with stars and planets, so I believe it’s best to be over cautious. In the end, no matter what you aim for, the compass course needs to be checked once a minute. That will tell you right away when to shift to a new object.
Captain John
Good stuff, Boat Rat. Any tips on steering in fog? Our last trip from Catalina, we were socked in nearly all the way to the Long Beach breakwater, with large aft-quarter rollers pointing us all over the place, and I felt like we were too dependent on the GPS. (Back of my mind, thinking, “What if this thing goes out?”)
Hi Jake. Here’s an article that may interest you: http://www.skippertips.com/snip/763.htm
Captain John
I have to add my snort of derision to the advice against using the planets as guiding stars. With the possible exception of the moon, all celestial bodies motion thru the sky is going to be entirely due to the earths rotation rather that any sort of proper motion. That motion, regardless of whether planet or star, will cause the heading one is following to become increasingly inaccurate of the course of 1 or 2 hours. Hence the need to recalibrate yourself with the compass periodically, and adjust the relative location of the star to the fixed point on your boat rigging. Lastly, making that sighting is easiest with stars closer to the horizon. Once the star or planet has risen to 45 or 50 degrees above the horizon, your best bet is to select another star along your course which is closer to the horizon. Have used this technique in offshore night races to keep the boat sailing close to luff. It’s clear the author has never actually used the night steering technique.
Shouldn’t you be talking about keeping a heading rather than a course?
As an aviator with 40 years experience I know that the course is where we want to go but the heading is what we have to point the aircraft or boat to in order to stay on the course. So our helmsman is challenged to keep the boat on a specific heading so that the boat will track a course despite the effects of wind and current.
Thanks for the comments. Here are my thoughts.
Eric, indeed I have used the star steering method–primarily as a deck watch officer aboard small Coast Guard cutters. We often operated around large fleets of fishing vessels or busy traffic lanes in the North Atlantic. On the distant horizon, their masthead lights were sometimes mistaken for stars. Thus, we were cautious to train the helm to steer on stars higher above the horizon.
Ed, compass course and heading can be used to describe the same thing. In “The Annapolis Book of Seamanship“, John Rousmaniere calls the desired course “Track” (TR) and the course steered “Compass Course” (C). The compass course being steered compensates for any forces such as wind or current. Both TR and C (If different from TR) are plotted onto the chart. I also use these terms in my own book “Seamanship Secrets”, published by International Marine/McGraw-Hill.