Navigation

One of the topics at the Pacific Cup seminar was around navigation. When someone asked about bringing a sextant and knowing celestial navigation, the answer was: "bring two GPS"

Navigation for the Pac Cup is overall pretty straightforward - strategy and local tactics around squalls, etc...to avoid being stuck in the hole behind the squalls but where you're going is quite straightforward. The further South you go, the more distance you are adding to your destination. The further North you go, the more likely you are to hit the High and end up in the No Wind dread zone.

It is straightforward if you equip yourself with the right tools...Viewfax to view weather info, "Expedition" was recommended for race tactics. It takes parameters for any given boat + weather info from your weather faxes and probably has some general info about the area you are navigating in and will recommend a course. Apparently, it is not always accurate...sometimes, it thinks that you are in a storm when you are really enjoying a nice and pleasant sunny afternoon. So its suggestions are not always perfect.

Gone are the romantic times of meeting with the moon and stars to find out your position...

Nathan and I are taking a Celestial Navigation class (right now in fact!) - someone told us about these solar flares that can disrupt and shut down the entire GPS system for a while...And it's fun. I like maths.

I really need to figure out what to do with a laptop. I am looking at very low power consumption laptops. They all take 12V so we could get a car charger and hook it to the boat battery. Since we won't be using the laptop very often, this should last us quite a while. If you have any recommendations, let me know.

We are buying all this big equipment now as we want to have time to see it fail if it must ;-)