MASTERCLASS

Creating a pilotage plan has long been a key navigational skill and most of us will have encountered various examples through our sailing lives. The plan is a simplified recreation of the chart, on a piece of paper that you can take on deck and annotate to aid with eyeball navigation en route. It allows the sailor to change the scale, focussing only on the features that are important to them, and is derived from the days when we all used paper charts and it was a cardinal sin to take them on deck.

Times have moved on. Most of us have chart plotters on deck and apps on our phones that allow us to see, in real time, where we are on the chart, as well as monitoring