Ahoy mates,

Rick edges me closer to comment. He always does. We made a point of
meeting shortly after the book came out, in S.F. I think Rick has
already heard this, and I may be repeating a post from long ago, so
with apologies:

In my mind I have simple way of looking at it. Querencia only has 4
speeds: 0,2,4,or 6 knots. Assuming you know how 0 feels quite well
and 6 pretty well, you are left with 2 or 4 as a guess and you have
50% chance of being right. With a little experience you will know the
difference between them too.

In our twenty-six years of sailing Querencia we have never had a knot-
meter. I was too stubborn to drill another hole in the hull. We had a
taffrail log we trailed leaving the NW but gave up on that
eventually. Just another tangle worry and sharks liked to chew on it.
It still sits in its pine box in the nav station.

Coming up from Bora Bora to Hawai'i we did DR, Sat Nav, and Celestial
as we had done before, but we paid careful attention to DR vs. Sat
Nav fix. We were never more than 10 miles off the fix. Time,
direction, speed... are very useful and not all that complicated.
That and some plotting paper and you're all set.

I think our worst distance day blue-water cruising was 17 n. miles,
and our best was 126 n.m. Neither was that comfortable. 100 was
average and comfortable.

You can also drop something off the bow that floats and see how long
it takes to pass the stern and take that time and the length and do
some math to get your speed. That's something you could do on those
days when you only make 17 n.m. :)

Smooth Sailing,
John (and Davey)
SV Querencia (BABA 30)
jfm@sailingthedream.com




-----------------------------------------------------------
Baba Panda and Tashiba Owners Mailing List --
For more info, please check out the FAQ...
http://www.ballreich.net/hypermail/baba-l/faq.html

Received on Sat Feb 11 10:17:37 2006