NAVIGATION LOST

Let’s be honest: nobody ever really knew exactly where they were with certainty before GPS came along. Dead reckoning was the navigator’s daily stock-in-trade, that and his ability to maintain a poker face when putting his finger on the chart and saying: ‘We’re here.’

y first offshore race was the North Sea Race, a triangular course starting on the east coast of England and ending, with any luck, just outside the Dutch port of Rotterdam. All was going according to plan until, late in the evening before the start of the race, our navigator announced that he had left the charts back in London. Since it was too late to go back and fetch them, he set about making his own chart on the back of an old one, using nothing but a Reeds Almanac, parallel rules, dividers, and a #2 pencil. Intrigued, and just a bit apprehensive, I spent much