Judging distances at sea

The universal use of GPS has made navigation simpler and improved safety at sea. Coupled with this revolution has been a fading of traditional navigation skills and observations. When electronic navigation was widely introduced in the 1990s the RYA was very concerned about the potential abandonment of these navigation techniques, which are a backbone of the yachtmaster syllabus. This was mainly because of a lack of trust in a system which relies on signals from satellites 12,500 km away

GPS proved to be much more reliable than we all feared, so only a minority of skippers get a pencil out to navigate these days. However, there are some skills which are still relevant and