Article by Capt. Mark Sampson
I live on a canal in West Ocean City and during the winter my charter boat floats behind the house in peaceful hibernation. But in the spring I move it down to the Ocean City Fishing Center where I’ve been running charters for more years now than I care to think about. So, come summertime, my home and work are a couple miles apart, and I rather care to keep it that way. Not that I don’t like and very much appreciate clients who book my boat and put bread on my table, in fact many have become great friends whom I greatly enjoy fishing with every year. It’s just that “home” becomes a bit of a “refuge” during the crazily busy time of the summer and one of the few places where I can retreat to at the end of each day and just be “the goofy neighbor on the corner” instead of “Captain Mark of the Fish Finder.” It’s always nice to be able to get home and lose the game-face at the end of each day!
But there these days home is not quite the sanctuary it used to be as more than just a few times over each seasons I’ve been surprised to look out the window in the early morning to see a carload of customers in my backyard looking for the boat. It seems they don’t always catch the line in the confirmation letter I send them explaining that the boat is located at a different address than the one at the top of my stationary. As I said, “I like my clients,” but I like them best at the marina or out on the boat, not when they’re wandering around my yard interrupting my breakfast! But these days it seems too many folks are willing to plunk themselves into a car, throw an address into their phone and let the devise take it from there.
“Turn left, turn right, destination straight ahead.”
“Hey! This doesn’t look like the marina!”
It really wasn’t all that long ago that we were installing the first GPS units on our boats. They were faster and more accurate than the old LORANs we had been using for navigation and since they took their signals from satellites rather than land-based towers they would keep us on track no matter where on earth we traveled. Like all electronics these days, GPS features, particularly the ones we have on our boats provide mariners with so much information that a lot of the units require a large flat-screen display to show it all.
One of the most notable features on many GPS units these days it the “charting” capability, which not only provides the captain with an electronic image of a chart but also places a representation of the boat on the screen and moves it around chart as the boat moves through the water. With this feature mariners no longer need to take a set of latitude and longitude coordinates from the GPS and plot them on a paper chart to see where they are, are going, or have been, instead they simply look at the screen to see their location, track line, and what’s up ahead. To get from one place to another is now as simple as scrolling a cursor or tapping the screen where you want to end up hit “Go To” and the machine will have your course plotted out before you even have time to lean back in the helm seat.
This technology is nothing new, it’s now been available for a couple decades, which means that there is an entire generation of boaters that have had it available to them their entire lives. And therein resides the problem, today there is hefty population of boaters who know nothing more about navigation than “scroll the cursor to where you want to go and push the button”! Steering a boat from here to the fishing grounds, or for that matter, from here to the other side of the world, is nothing more than a video game with wind in your face.
Navigation from point “A” to point “B” has become ridiculously easy, which in itself is a good thing because “easy” is “accurate” and accurate translates to “safe”. But the problem is that we’re dealing with boats, and as we all know, boats tend to malfunction now and again! When they do, skippers had better have some kind of “backup plan” or things could go from bad to worse really quick. Obviously if the only tools someone has for finding their way safely to and from the ocean is their index finger and a GPS they’re going to be in trouble if either one of them has a major malfunction in the course of the day. Since God gave us ten fingers to work with I think most of us are covered in the event that we have issues with our pointers, but if our GPS goes blank while we’re 58 miles out and we need to get home before the sun drops and the storms hit what then? The simple answer is to have a second GPS rigged and ready “just in case,” but it’s not uncommon to hear of lightning strikes or other major electrical problems that shut-down or totally frazzle all electronics on a boat. So what then?
Back-up plan “B” can be the phone in your pocket if you have the right app and know how to use it to actually navigate a boat with. Back-up plan “C” on every vessel should be a paper chart, plotting tools (dividers, parallel rules, pencil) and the basic navigation skills that allow one to find their location on a chart and plot a course home. Such skills and tools have been standard equipment aboard every vessel that has put to sea for hundreds of years and it’s amazing to think that in just the last decade or so many mariners have are now willing leverage the safety of their passengers and vessels solely on premise that an electronic box on the dash of their boat will not malfunction while they’re underway.
It almost scares me to think how many boats I’ve been on in the past few years that didn’t have a single paper chart aboard. “Don’t need one!” the captains usually say as they proudly point to their high-tech big screen chart plotter. I don’t smoke and I’ve never been stuck in the woods overnight but I always keep a pack of matches and lighter in my hunting pack “just in case” something weird happens and I need to survive a cold night on a marsh or under the trees. Likewise, even though I have two GPS units mounted on my dash and a hand-held in a drawer, I also have four charts aboard that will guide me into any inlet between Cape May and Virginia Beach and the know-how to, whenever necessary, put pencil to the paper and plot out a course to the closest safe harbor.
Simple navigation can be learned in Coast Guard Auxiliary or captain’s courses, online, from books, or from a knowledgeable friend. Wherever they get it, every mariner who puts to sea should do so with the tools and skills to get out and back without the aid of electronic circuits and LCD displays. And while I’m on that note I’ll point out that drivers these days seem to be following the bad examples of mariners by hitting the road without a “paper map” somewhere in their vehicles. Our phones sure make finding a destination easier, but I’m not sure how much of a favor they’re doing us when we totally lose our ability to read a map or follow simple hand written directions. If you doubt what I’m saying just ask the six guys looking for a marina in my back yard! §
