026 - Dead Reckoning and Electronic Charts

I like the old school navigation of dead reckoning even if it’s not very accurate. With a compass built into our binoculars, its easy and accurate to get a bearing. As we were going down Lake Erie I was wondering where the Weland canal came in (the canal around Niagara Falls), I was hoping to see some commercial traffic. I could see it on the electronic charts but I couldn’t see it on land and then it hit me, this is a big loss with electronic charts, not being able to get a bearing to a target. I’m sure there is a way, but I haven’t figured it out yet. Likewise, I wouldn’t know how to put a bearing in to validate our current position. Instead, I use the phone or the iPad to validate the chartplotter and we already know how well those devices have worked in Canada -NOT. As long as GPS doesn’t go out I’ll be fine, but if I need to dead reckon, give me those paper charts!

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046 - Fog Bank a Comin

To all those who insist on paper charts as a backup to electronics, “what good are they in fog?” What was a surprise to us was the frequency of fog on the lakes, it wasn’t anticipated by us, seemed like a New England issue not a lake issue. But the water is cold (60s in the big water) and the air is warm which is perfect for dense fog. We learned at the shipwreck museum that a large percentage of ship wrecks on the Great Lakes are ships driving into other ships, mostly in dense fog. Radar, GPS, electronics charts and AIS should mostly preclude this cause of shipwrecks. We expected the number one cause for shipwrecks to be bad weather (think Edmond Fitgerald) but bad weather only accounted for ¼ of so of great lakes shipwrecks. With far better forecasting today, this too shouldn’t be an issue like it used to be. But back to our story, without radar, we played our fog horn, set a watch on the bow, watched the AIS for ships (we could see them ...

034 - USS Niagara

What a beautiful working replica of this historic ship. It is used today as a training ship and offers 10day expeditions for youth to learn the ways of sailing a Brigg. It is about as exact as you can expect. I loved their use manila rope, linseed oil, and other items that gives it the smell of an old ship – I don’t know what it is but it’s very familiar. Below decks were tight, it only had a 5ft ceiling in the galley area – how anyone could operate in that space long term was beyond me but the professional crew does. Galley stove and 5ft ceiling - how do they do it? Watching it sail was like stepping back it time. It passed us on the breakwater silently, tall, and majestic. It was easy to imagine the awe seeing this come into an isolated harbor like Presque Island 200 years ago. Something so big and complicated carrying so many men and cannon would change the balance of power with its arrival. It would intimidate the st...

033 - Presque Island Is A Beautiful Oddity

Most the shore of Lake Erie is a long straight beach. But jutting out is a very large peninsula that loops back on itself creating a bay. They say it’s formed by glaciers but this isn’t obvious to the casual observer. For starters, I don’t see how a glacier can flow if it doesn’t have a mountain to slide down and there is nothing to the North I’d call a mountain worthy of the lake depth gouge. Call me a geo skeptic, but some of the stories they tell sound more like conjecture than science. Behind the beach is a steep hill that drops to a valley and then a significant mountain behind it so it generally looks like it was formed by a really big dozier. So why this odd shaped bay jutting out into the lake? And the bay it creates is very deep and the channel small, what glacier movement did this? No matter how it was formed, the place is important to American history and is very beautiful and home to a great hot dog stand, “Sara’s.” Lake E...

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