6 ms·

That sounds like a hell of a story. How did you find yourself in that situation? And how did you get out of it?

reaperman 3y ago
If it were me, I’d assume backup paper navigation charts and either a handheld battery powered backup GPS or my smartphone that has an app to parse data from the GPS chip. Could use primarily dead reckoning plus turn the phone on every couple hours to update true location. Most sailors are using paper charts for tricky sections anyways — you just normally have a constant GPS location provided by your navigation system. There are also lots of established shipping lanes you could find that would be relatively densely traveled and give you periodic feedback for which direction to go. A bit more dangerous due to collisions without lights but as long as your retroreflector is hoisted, big ships should see you clearly on radar. plus you’ll generally be swapping sleep shifts and always have someone manning the helm on the sailboat, though seeing large vessels at night can be somewhat more difficult.
- bmelton 3y ago
  Mostly all that's right. We had three phones and a few battery packs (tho we'd exhausted them more quickly than expected and lost one to rain) because the paper charts aboard were from the late 80s when the boat was built and were all for the Pacific ocean it was built to sail. The only other complicating factor was that due to the August Florida heat, nobody really had the luxury of sleep for the first couple of days.
- closewith 3y ago
  > Most sailors are using paper charts for tricky sections anyways — you just normally have a constant GPS location provided by your navigation system. My experience in Marine SAR is that this is no longer true. Apps like Navionics, SeaPilot, etc - often without any backup at all - are by far the most common form of navigation.
  - bmelton 3y ago
    Yeah. I've spent a lot of time learning charts and a terribly small amount of time actually using them. In this case, we didn't have the right ones anyway.
bmelton 3y ago
Offered to help the owner (a friend of a friend of a friend) of an older racing sailboat move his boat from Florida to Maryland. It was planned to be us and 4-5 other crew, but (red flag the first) ended up being only me, my wife, and the owner. There were lots of red flags before finding ourselves in squarely over our heads -- an overheating motor was explained away as having had an undersized thermostat installed. Plausible enough. The lack of a bimini in August in Florida was just forgotten, but led to pretty significant overheating to me. The autopilot not working we didn't realize until about 15 miles offshore. That the autopilot was draining all the other batteries we didn't realize until we lost navigation lights. Etc. Etc. This was embarrassingly recent, but suffice to say a LOT of lessons were learned. The boat was foreign enough that I accepted too many "explanations" as comfort when they should have been a reason to abort. Failures compounded and voila, we're now 15 hours away from civilization flying a spinnaker through thunderstorms at night and positively hauling ass. Eventually we got the owner to appreciate our discomfort enough and how over our heads we were to head to safety in Charleston (he'd still just been heading east, which was baffling -- but apparently it is not everyone's first instinct to go to safety when life-threatening failures crop up) but that brought its own perils -- coming into a crowded channel at night without navigation lights isn't advised. We were shining a flashlight onto the sails, but the flashlight would change modes if it wasn't held steadily enough. One of the storms we'd sailed through had killed the owner's phone as well as his phone charger, so the little bits of navigation we had were precious, but necessary coming into shallower coastal waters. A cargo ship coming out of harbor kicked us out of the channel just enough that we ended up grounded and stuck pretty squarely about a half mile away from restaurants, but late enough on a Sunday that there wasn't any other traffic we could hail down. (A radio would have been lovely in that case) I was sunburnt and heat-stroked enough that despite guzzling water constantly, I hadn't urinated in 24 hours, and though we were in relative calm, the totality of circumstances, I used the last of the dwindling battery on the last usable phone among us to call the coast guard for evacuation. The owner of the boat stayed behind. To paraphrase Cheryl Strayed -- If you'd asked me at any point in the journey, I was absolutely miserable, but on the whole it was miraculous. Gained a ton of skills. Learned a ton of red flags to look out for. Experienced a lot of firsts, not the least of which included a crash course in celestial navigation. And being 200 miles offshore and awake the whole night during the Perseid meteor shower was absolutely brilliant.

If it were me, I’d assume backup paper navigation charts and either a handheld battery powered backup GPS or my smartphone that has an app to parse data from the GPS chip. Could use primarily dead reckoning plus turn the phone on every couple hours to update true location. Most sailors are using paper charts for tricky sections anyways — you just normally have a constant GPS location provided by your navigation system. There are also lots of established shipping lanes you could find that would be relatively densely traveled and give you periodic feedback for which direction to go. A bit more dangerous due to collisions without lights but as long as your retroreflector is hoisted, big ships should see you clearly on radar. plus you’ll generally be swapping sleep shifts and always have someone manning the helm on the sailboat, though seeing large vessels at night can be somewhat more difficult.

bmelton 3y ago
Mostly all that's right. We had three phones and a few battery packs (tho we'd exhausted them more quickly than expected and lost one to rain) because the paper charts aboard were from the late 80s when the boat was built and were all for the Pacific ocean it was built to sail. The only other complicating factor was that due to the August Florida heat, nobody really had the luxury of sleep for the first couple of days.
closewith 3y ago
> Most sailors are using paper charts for tricky sections anyways — you just normally have a constant GPS location provided by your navigation system. My experience in Marine SAR is that this is no longer true. Apps like Navionics, SeaPilot, etc - often without any backup at all - are by far the most common form of navigation.
- bmelton 3y ago
  Yeah. I've spent a lot of time learning charts and a terribly small amount of time actually using them. In this case, we didn't have the right ones anyway.

bmelton 3y ago

Offered to help the owner (a friend of a friend of a friend) of an older racing sailboat move his boat from Florida to Maryland. It was planned to be us and 4-5 other crew, but (red flag the first) ended up being only me, my wife, and the owner. There were lots of red flags before finding ourselves in squarely over our heads -- an overheating motor was explained away as having had an undersized thermostat installed. Plausible enough. The lack of a bimini in August in Florida was just forgotten, but led to pretty significant overheating to me. The autopilot not working we didn't realize until about 15 miles offshore. That the autopilot was draining all the other batteries we didn't realize until we lost navigation lights. Etc. Etc. This was embarrassingly recent, but suffice to say a LOT of lessons were learned. The boat was foreign enough that I accepted too many "explanations" as comfort when they should have been a reason to abort. Failures compounded and voila, we're now 15 hours away from civilization flying a spinnaker through thunderstorms at night and positively hauling ass. Eventually we got the owner to appreciate our discomfort enough and how over our heads we were to head to safety in Charleston (he'd still just been heading east, which was baffling -- but apparently it is not everyone's first instinct to go to safety when life-threatening failures crop up) but that brought its own perils -- coming into a crowded channel at night without navigation lights isn't advised. We were shining a flashlight onto the sails, but the flashlight would change modes if it wasn't held steadily enough. One of the storms we'd sailed through had killed the owner's phone as well as his phone charger, so the little bits of navigation we had were precious, but necessary coming into shallower coastal waters. A cargo ship coming out of harbor kicked us out of the channel just enough that we ended up grounded and stuck pretty squarely about a half mile away from restaurants, but late enough on a Sunday that there wasn't any other traffic we could hail down. (A radio would have been lovely in that case) I was sunburnt and heat-stroked enough that despite guzzling water constantly, I hadn't urinated in 24 hours, and though we were in relative calm, the totality of circumstances, I used the last of the dwindling battery on the last usable phone among us to call the coast guard for evacuation. The owner of the boat stayed behind. To paraphrase Cheryl Strayed -- If you'd asked me at any point in the journey, I was absolutely miserable, but on the whole it was miraculous. Gained a ton of skills. Learned a ton of red flags to look out for. Experienced a lot of firsts, not the least of which included a crash course in celestial navigation. And being 200 miles offshore and awake the whole night during the Perseid meteor shower was absolutely brilliant.