Novice Navigator’s Tale 

Waaaay back when, in the Virgin Islands, I had just finished building my 32′ Block Island Schooner and I was ready to go sailing! I had no knot meter, no engine, no radio, no navigation equipment of any kind except for an old (really old) “Taffrail Log” which is basically a propeller on a long rope that you tow behind the boat. The spinning propeller turns a gauge that reads out in nautical miles. In theory, this gives you your distance traveled through the water and along with your compass heading helps you to plot your course. I was warned that it wasn’t super accurate but I thought that it would be close enough.

I was pretty good at piloting along a coast and had my nautical almanac with a “light list” in it so that I could identify navigation lights as I found them, but I was getting ready to make my first passage out of sight of land and was justifiably nervous. The “Anegada Passage” between the Lesser Antilles Islands and the Leeward Islands is known for strong, hard to predict currents due to it’s position between the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, so I was warned to not assume anything and be cautious.

I set out in the late afternoon into a moderate sea with a decent breeze on the port bow. Two days later I had worked fairly far south into the island chain and stopped at the Island of Nevis and rested, had a meal on shore and took on more ice. I set out in the late afternoon trying to guesstimate a daylight arrival at my next destination, Montserrat. The next day I spotted an island off the port bow and consulted my chart. It seemed as if I had made really good time but had sagged off to leeward more than I had hoped. I tried to make sense of it looking at my charts and recalculating my speed. I convinced myself that the island was, indeed, Montserrat and altered course towards it. I hadn’t anticipated reaching it that day so wasn’t surprised when I realized that night would fall before I could get there. Montserrat has a pretty easy harbor entrance but it was against everything I knew to make landfall in the dark unless you absolutely knew the harbor like the back of your hand. I had spent 3 years building my boat and wasn’t going to wreck it for a dumb mistake.

So, ever the prudent mariner, I closed on the Island and spent the night reaching back and forth a safe distance offshore, waiting for enough light to make a safe entrance. It was tough to keep it up all night as I had no self steering and it was just me and my girlfriend to share the helm. I was puzzled by the lack of lights where the town should be as there were only a few, but we were convinced that there must have been a power outage (common in the Caribbean in those days) and that we were seeing only the light of lanterns that were strong enough to reach us.

Dawn finally bought us enough light to show us the island that we spent the last 9-10 hours standing on and off of was not Montserrat at all, but an almost uninhabited island called “Redonda” and the lights we had been seeing were fishing boats anchored. Feeling incredibly stupid, but knowing for sure where I was, I plotted my course for Montserrat some 20 miles dead upwind. The seas were kind enough where we were able to make port late in the afternoon, sparing me another night sailing back and forth.

The two lessons that I learned is that if you are getting somewhere faster than you should, particularly if you’re sailing upwind in a gaff rigged schooner, you’ve made a mistake in your navigation and that you shouldn’t try to navigate between a couple of islands with a chart that shows about half of the entire Caribbean Sea, no matter how $ poor of a sailor you might be.

When I returned home to St. John, I bought a sextant and, painstakingly learned to use it. After about 1,000 attempts I was able to locate my position on earth using the sun and the stars.  I remain convinced to this day, that it was my dogged determination to learn to navigate in the time honored fashion that ushered in the era of the $100 GPS to make my sextant skills moot.

Whenever I hear a story of botched navigation I remember Redonda Rock, more fondly now than on the morning of the discovery of my “Navigational Incompetence”