Snapshot of our route taken from the ECDIS zoomed up a few ranges
2000 nautical miles is the distance between our starting point and our finishing point, rounded down to the nearest 50 nautical miles. Thats a fair amount of water to put through the propellor, and it takes a few days and all. About 5½ days give or take a few hours. For those of you who don’t know what a nautical mile is, 2000 nautical miles is about 2300 land miles or 3700 kilometres for the SI measurement system believers. So you would get here a bit quicker by road but you would need 600 road tankers to lift the same amount of oil, not very practical. It would be one hell of a sight though!
We are heading through the English Channel and the weather is fine sunny, good visibility, 10 degrees C, SW’ly wind force 5 and the traffic is behaving itself which is always a bonus. The barometer is up to 1030 mbar so it looks like we might keep the good weather for a spell. March is a dodgy month for weather, you can still get a nasty storm that will kick the shit out of you, or you can get days like this, where you could sunbathe nearly,ok with all your clothes on and a blanket. But Spring is most definitely in the air, and when we are in port you can almost hear the birds behind the din of pumps and machinery.
So it has been an eventful weather week, ice and snow in St. Petersburg, fog in the gulf of Finland, rain in the North Sea (where else) and Sunshine and blue skies in the Channel, looks like the tendency is positive.
I wil give up on the weather vein now (excuse the pun) I will return with a diatribe on the weather at a later date.
Bye for now, and don’t be shy, leave a comment!
Be my guest and leave a comment if you like!
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Tim
So a NM is 6000ft right? I used to just add 11% to the speed in mph to get knots.Rough estimate but close enough for government work
Now at your start point do you follow a pre-set course from waypoint to waypoint to your destination or do you just go all ad-hoc depending on traffic,weather etc? Kind of like IFR and VFR?
Pretty cool stuff there Tim although I was kind of disappointed that you weren’t up there with a sextant and a pocket watch keeping the eye out for a lee shore
I have sailed with a few navigators who were with Vasco Da Gama in their youth, and one who was mate on the Ark, apparently Noah was a fucker for punctuality, if you didn’t turn to on time, the wrath of God was nothing compared to his fits of rage. But these old sea dogs managed to pass on some of the real arts of navigation and I have been known to whip out the sextant at twilight and do a 7 star fix with my trustee chronometer and aeronautical tables! GPS is for amateurs!
Now back to 2007… a nautical mile is 1852 meters and just over 6000 feet. Your 11% correction is fairly ballpark, I’d be more around 15% myself, but it’s all academic really, getting from a to b without hitting anything, going aground or sinking is more important.
We start out with a waypoint plan but are flexible depending on traffic, depth of water, and proximity to navigation hazards. In the good old days, you had a chart and away you went, these days you are required to plan a route with distances to go and ETA’s which we rarely keep, the younger guys stick religiously to the route track, but I am a bit more adventurous and can wander a few cables port or starboard!
You can’t really do a comparison to IFR/VFR we have to have a plan by legislation, I’m not so sure about yachts and the like.
Jaysus I had to do some thinking there Dev! Cheers for the comment, Tim.