Stress free nav

Time was when teaching Day Skipper and Yachtmaster that I would get to the bit about GPS and satellite navigation and people’s eyes would light up in wonder and amazement.

Not any more.

We now have GPS on everything from watches and phones to chart plotters.

We take the electronics for granted, but do we actually know what they are telling us?

I wrote Stress Free Navigation because there is a gap in the Day Skipper and Yachtmaster offerings. We do cover electronic navigation, but we only really touch on it. I wanted to integrate the electronic with the traditional. I have approached every subject from the electronic first, and then explained what it means. I compare the accuracy of the electronic answers versus the manual answers derived from the Almanac, the chart and traditional methods – and the result is, frankly, the same. The difference is that the electronics come up with the answer in an instant and manually it takes longer.

The first thing we need to