All Piss and Wind Page 5
But there must have been something about the trauma of that day that repressed my memory of the handy hitch Mick had shown me. I’ve tried to reproduce it many times since, but can’t. I’ve searched through knot books in vain for anything that might do the same job. An old Cape Horner at the club once told me he knew the hitch well – ‘Aye, sonny. That’d be your painter’s knot’ – but when I looked it up in my treasured copy of Cassell’s Work Handbook of Knotting and Splicing (first published 1904), the illustration was for a harmless sling to hold a paint tin at the end of a rope. Foiled again.
Mick, I’m delighted to say, is still active around the waterfront and is now a rightly revered elder statesman of the Cruising Yacht Club he did so much to establish. He recently won a Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of his voluntary work for the Sydney Heritage Fleet. We bump into each other from time to time, but even after 40 years I can never quite summon the gumption to ask him to tie that hitch for me again. I know what he’d say. ‘Listen, mate, I showed you once. That ought to be enough.’
The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be –
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.
Robert Frost, Neither Out Far Nor In Deep, 1936
ONE OF THE TRADITIONAL methods used in training Royal Navy midshipmen has been to attach these youngsters to the ship’s navigator as his ‘tanky’. Their extra duty in that role is to meticulously update, correct and annotate all the charts on board Her Majesty’s Ship in accordance with lists published as part of the Admiralty Fleet Orders and the Notices to Mariners. This doesn’t seem like such a huge job – after all, how much can the land and ocean change?
A lot. Not, of course, the major features, but the endless detail. The world’s hydrographers are constantly increasing our knowledge of the ocean and its shores, and adjusting the best estimates of their predecessors as to soundings and the exact positions of potentially dangerous reefs, shoals and hidden obstructions. Add to that the annoyingly haphazard changes made by harbour authorities to the lights, leads and buoyage at our most difficult port entries. So, after standing their normal watch, the ‘tankies’ of the Royal Navy soon found they’d need to devote most of their waking hours to this exacting task. But they also learned a huge amount about charts and the crucial role they play in navigation.
I would have loved to have been given that job. When it comes to charts, I’m something of a silly old sentimentalist. (Please remember it’s always a ‘chart’, not a ‘map’. Maps are for land; charts for the sea.) To me their elegant tracery of black lines and blue shading, the delicately inscribed numbers and words, their cryptic repertoire of tiny symbols, the archaic vocabulary of terms and place-names – they all evoke the special magic of seafaring. And I should confess here my prejudice for the understated graphical grace of the old ‘fathom’ charts over the current metric editions with their garish yellow to indicate land. If you really need bright colours to identify terra firma, then perhaps you should never leave it.
At home there’s a large chart bag stuffed with out-of-date, redundant or irreparably damaged charts collected from the yachts I’ve sailed on over the years. It doesn’t take much of an excuse for me to drag that bag down from its shelf in the hall cupboard. The most trivial memory lapse or temporary confusion will do. For example: South West Solitary Island, that craggy little outcrop close inshore near Coffs Harbour. Is it actually north or south of the much larger South Solitary Island? Let’s have a look.
My hands riffle through the stack of yellowing paper until I find Aus. 812 – Smoky Cape to Clarence River. There it is. Hmm, thought so. SW Solitary is about two miles north, off Bare Bluff. The bricks I must have been thinking of are Black Rock. But then, inevitably, I let my gaze wander a little way seaward across the chart to take in the fading pencilled tracks and plotted positions of a voyage long past. Ah yes, I remember that trip. We were coming back from Southport, only four of us on board, decent little easterly on the beam … And soon there’s another hour wasted as I pick through the charts and my mind drifts back to forgotten races and the simple joys of an easy passage sailed in good company.
Every serious racing yacht has a designated navigator, but some of the more experienced crew will also have sufficient grasp of the fundamentals to interpret a chart sensibly and plot a rough course. Most of us like to have a dabble at the ‘guessing’ game, partly because the nav station is usually the most snug and comfortable place on a boat. Few tired crew can resist a self-satisfied smile as they climb below, ease themselves into the navigator’s nook, switch on the overhead light and begin the pleasant ritual of having a little look-see as to ‘how we’re going’. The nav station offers a dry place to park your posterior and a flat space – the chart table – on which to work. The table invariably has a lifting lid with space below to store all the charts required for that trip plus the assorted geometrical paraphernalia of the navigator’s craft.
If yachts have a ‘command post’ then the nav station is it. The GPS (Global Positioning System) navigational computer is directly to hand, along with the HF and VHF radios, electrical switch panel and any repeater units of the main performance instrument readouts. The standard Admiralty charts themselves are quite big – around 110 cm by 74 cm – so the area of a yacht’s chart table is normally half that size, allowing the chart to be folded back along its centre line in time-honoured fashion. It’s always a good moment during any trip when the navigator announces that he’s had to ‘turn the chart over’; even better when he declares we’ve made so much progress that we’re now ‘off the chart’ and he’s had to dig the next one out from beneath the table. By international convention all navigational charts are drawn to Mercator’s Projection and their scale varies from 1:25,000 (for awkward little islands and harbours) to 1:1,000,000 to encompass whole slabs of ocean (for example, from the Australian east coast to Fiji). Many single charts are masterpieces of cartographic compression, combining conventional 1:100,000 outlines of the main coastline with much more detailed sectional charts of islands and port entries, each ingeniously placed within the vacant spaces of ocean.
The fundamental duty of navigation is to provide reliable information as to the yacht’s current position. Sounds simple, but until twenty or so years ago this was still done by taking a daily sun-sight by sextant, then using that data as the basis for a long sequence of mathematical calculations that would eventually yield a ‘fix’. Any other positions that may have been required during the next 24 hours were usually little more than educated guesses based on DR (‘dead reckoning’). These were often remarkably accurate – largely depending on the experience of the navigator – but they could also be disastrously wrong, most often because of undetected strong currents. Three knots of undertow is not uncommon around the Australian coast. For centuries sailors weren’t too fussed about their precise position, as long as they couldn’t see land or hear surf on rocks. Benjamin Franklin’s journal of his passage from Yarmouth to Philadelphia in the mid eighteenth century leaves us a charmingly droll impression of the rather tedious business of logging daily positions:
Wednesday, August 10
Wind NW. Course SW about four knots. By observation in latitude 48°50'. Nothing remarkable happened.
These days, with the advent of GPS, a pinpoint position can be obtained at any time with the simple press of a button – in any weather, day or night.
But those raw coordinates provided by the GPS will only tell us where we are at that moment – they offer no account of where we’ve been, or guide to where we might like to go. For that we need a chart. The latitude/longitude coordinates from the GPS must be transferred by a few minutes of simple geometry and plotted onto the paper chart. By that process we can generate a large-scale graphical record that’s easy to read and understand.
It’s prudent to put a ‘mark on the chart’ every hour during a passage, or half-hour if conditions are difficult or the desired tra
ck takes the yacht through dangerous water. Any interested crewmember can then pause at the nav station, take a quick glance at the sequence of pencil plots on the chart and form a solid impression of the yacht’s progress and any hazards ahead. During tricky coastal passages this system also works as simple confirmation for the helmsman and crew as to their position relative to points on shore. If the loom of a distant lighthouse suddenly appears over the bow at night, a quick plot and reference to information on the chart will soon confirm its identity. The ‘on’ watch can then make the appropriate adjustment to their course. Many yachts now use electronic chart-plotting computers, but their display screens can only be accessed at the fixed point on the boat where they’ve been installed. The more affluent racing boats have a large repeater screen mounted in the cockpit close to the helm – a handy aid to safety, especially at night.
But machines have no soul. Few things stir my sense of sailing nostalgia more than that well-thumbed assemblage of folded Admiralty paper nestling below the lid of the chart table, just waiting to be hauled out to guide us through the next passage. A chart can embody all the romance and challenge of the sea, and its inexhaustible capacity to delight, instruct and surprise. What could comfort the sailor’s eye more than the lovely compass ‘rose’ – in effect just a printed protractor facing north? One rose is always carefully placed in patches of open sea or land on each half of the chart. Tiny, neat lettering along the east–west line of that rose alerts us to the prevailing variation between true north and magnetic north in the region covered by the chart. On the east coast of Australia that gentle reminder usually confirms that the magnetic bearing increases ‘about 3 minutes annually’ from a nominated date. And woe betide any lazy navigator who forgets to factor that variation into the heading he then passes on to the helmsman!
But charts of the sea and coastline aren’t just static objects of reference. They’re active, working tools and a huge resource of instant, accessible information on just about every physical factor that might have some bearing on completing a safe passage. Any semi-numerate sailor can now plot their position in seconds using GPS, but for those who take a genuine interest in the art of navigation a good chart is a living thing. For an indication of the staggering richness of this information, beginners can browse through the booklet Symbols, Terms and Abbreviations Used on Charts sold at most chandleries and all chart agencies. (But please don’t buy the Admiralty’s own tome – the replica version published by the Royal New Zealand Navy Hydrographic Office is half the price. The colonies strike back!)
The booklet lists and illustrates more than 1000 symbols, distinguishing marks and abbreviations commonly used on charts. Their precision can be breathtaking. While one symbol indicates a ‘rock awash at level of the chart datum’, another signifies ‘dangerous underwater rock of uncertain depth’, and yet another shows ‘breakers in areas where no soundings have been taken’. Nothing if not exact, our Lords of the Admiralty. Specific symbols distinguish between eight different species of trees. Where a church is visible from the sea the chart will confirm whether the building has a tower, spire or cupola. There’s even a symbol for a marabout, the shrine marking the burial place of a Muslim hermit or monk. (You’re unlikely to find many of these along the Australian coastline, but one can never be too careful.)
Impressed? Let’s move on to the list of abbreviations for 26 types of sea-bed (from silt to cobbles), refined by another 20 qualifying terms (from ‘fine’ to ‘hard’, via glacial and mud). Speaking of marine deposits, there’s a special symbol for Foraminifera, which, as you know, are protozoan marine organisms with perforated shells, not to be confused with Globigerima, which are, of course … oh, never mind. For those who have difficulty remembering which side to leave the channel markers entering port, there are codified indicators for more than 100 types of buoys and beacons used to delineate shipping lanes and leads. These include 20 different lights, which come in a fetching range of eight colours. Quick, get below and look it up before we hit the bloody thing!
But beyond this priceless store of information, a well-used chart can have often have deep emotional value. By tradition (or laziness), few navigators rub out their pencil marks from the last trip until that chart is used again. In the meantime, it’s possible to run your eye down those old hourly plots and waypoints to relive the pleasure or pain of a trip that might otherwise be fast fading from memory. Aus. 423 – Eddystone Point to Port Jackson is a handy chart commonly used for the delivery back from Hobart. My copy took a famous greeny that poured down the companionway somewhere off Gabo Island and is consequently now chalky to the touch and spotted with black mould. There’s also a large brown stain in Shoalhaven Bight, testimony to a round of stiff Irish coffees that ended a particularly cold 0300 watch. (An almost identical stain appears on Aus. 148 about a mile east of Anvil Rock in the Kent Group, but its origins are now lost in the mists of mental decrepitude.)
Some charts become personal favourites. I confess to a particular soft spot for Aus. 795 – South East Cape to Cape Pillar. Look closely just to the north-west of Cape Raoul and you’ll find Salters Point, a special comfort of personal vanity on the annual trip across Storm Bay at the end of the Sydney–Hobart. Another favourite is Aus. 213, whose main features are Lord Howe Island, Middleton and Elizabeth Reefs, and Ball’s Pyramid. Lord Howe Island wasn’t on Cook’s first chart of the ocean between the mainland and Norfolk Island. It was accidentally discovered by a supply ship on its way to Norfolk Island in February 1788 – just three weeks after Governor Phillip proclaimed settlement at Port Jackson. Aus. 213 still carries this quaint warning:
Craft under sail approaching within 1½ miles from the Island (with an off shore wind), are likely to be dismasted by the gusts which alternate with the dead lulls.
The notorious Wolfe Rock was clearly noted as a hazard back in the 1880s, lying in ‘Very Foul Ground’. What a pity the Royal Navy officers aboard HMS Nottingham didn’t heed the patient work of their hydrographic forebears.
But, for me, the most captivating navigational artefacts are the supplementary-detail charts of remote sections of our coastline, some of which haven’t been changed significantly for more than a century. Aus. 175 – Bathurst Channel and Port Davey was first drawn by Lieutenant J. F. Parry, RN, working from Her Majesty’s Surveying Ship Dart in 1899. Charts of that era predate the technology that allowed typeset information to be overlaid onto printed lithography. All the original text information and notes for Aus. 175 are therefore in the original mapmaker’s flawless calligraphy. This distinctive hand lettering speaks of an age when the British Admiralty – to its everlasting credit – was prepared to expend millions of man-hours minutely charting the distant corners of their vast maritime Empire, and hang the expense.
Equally evocative are the useful miniature engravings, each aligned precisely against its charted section of coastline, that give a remarkably accurate picture of how those same miles of coastline will appear to vessels well out at sea. It’s an enchanting little ritual to study these beautiful drawings, then pop your head up the hatchway and see Cook’s Pigeon House or Mount Dromedary exactly as they’re shown on a chart that was first prepared more than a century earlier. Especially atmospheric in these Victorian-era charts are some of the unexplained names they record for prominent features. Less than a mile inland from Bramble Cove, Aus. 175 shows a mountain rising to 1570 feet, neatly labelled as ‘Mt Misery’. What sad story lies behind that dutiful moment in topography?
Meanwhile there is, regrettably, not much point attempting to stand against the tide of technology. Electronic navigational tools are swiftly replacing the traditional methods. Like all sophisticated computer-based devices, the price of chart-plotters is reducing as their adoption becomes more widespread. I’m happy to concede that the idea of interfacing GPS data with chart graphics pre-loaded from CD was brilliant: it offers a continuous representation of the yacht’s position without having to go through the process of deriving a plot. All th
e basic information you’ll need to navigate thousands of coastal miles can now be acquired on disc for a few hundred dollars. Yet, to my mind, that’s just about where their appeal ends. Plotters can be quite cumbersome to use – especially when ‘zooming’ in or out to establish relative distance or to identify a detail. Scrolling to check what lies ahead can also be tediously slow compared with the simple action of casting your eye across a paper chart in real time.
The most troubling concern many veteran sailors have about chart-plotters is that they are entirely dependent on the yacht’s 12-volt power system. For that reason the Notice of Race for all major offshore events still requires each boat to carry the paper charts appropriate to that passage. (For the Sydney–Hobart Race this compels every entrant to take 19 charts.) Well-found yachts will also carry at least one hand-held GPS as a backup in the event of total power failure within the boat, or a specific failure of the 12-volt GPS. These incredible little battery-operated devices have saved many an offshore bacon, but they also gobble up power at a daunting rate. A drawer full of fresh AA ‘long-life’ batteries is always a prudent investment.
Chart-plotters will improve, and there’s little doubt that every passage-making yacht will soon have one. Hand-held versions are now available, and may eventually become as ubiquitous as the back-up GPS. Meanwhile, I’ll still pine for the lost elegance and historical character of classical cartography. But, looking on the bright side, at least their demise should yield a treasury of discarded old charts for my collection.