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few months ago I read an article about the helpfulness
of cruisers who came to the rescue of a couple who
had become stranded on a reef in the western Pacific.
Their thanks were heart-felt, their good fortune
at having other cruisers within a day's sail of
their disaster was amazing. Still they lost the
boat and many personal possessions and years of
preparation.
Almost hidden at the end of the story was an
even more amazing fact, the reason they had sailed
downwind onto the semi-submerged reef. Like a
large number of sailors today, their boat was
equipped with not only electronic charts, but
a GPS, chart plotter and the like. They had put
the waypoints for their destination into the computer
and set the auto-steering gear to this course.
Their normal practice had been to back up the
electronic positioning by plotting their position
on a paper chart every twelve hours. They hit
the reef ten hours after plotting their previous
position. The culprit? The course plotted by their
computerized gear was directly across the reef.
Their warning to others - plot your position every
six hours. But what about a more important warning
- have paper charts on board, study what lies
ahead for the next several hundred miles, then
lay out a course. With currents often changing
direction, speeding up or slowing down around
sheer sided reefs, why not plan a course that
gives you fifty or a hundred miles clearance.
If you do this several hundred miles before the
obstacle it might add only a dozen miles to your
voyage. Remember, just-submerged reefs may not
give any return at all on radar and with even
a fifteen or twenty knot breeze stirring up the
seas.
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