NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Planning a blue water CN cruise/holiday
From: Trevor Kenchington
Date: 2004 Oct 21, 11:09 +0000
From: Trevor Kenchington
Date: 2004 Oct 21, 11:09 +0000
Jim, A good travel agent should be able to give you a list of freighters which carry paying passengers. The only time I have investigated that option was when moving to Canada way back in 1977. At that time, only one line would take passengers between Europe and Canada -- they were ore carriers hauling iron ore from the Quebec North Shore to Rotterdam. (I ended up crossing on the QEII instead. She had low student-standby fares in those days.) I expect that there is still a database of such voyages but I cannot confirm it. However, I suspect that you will need a captain who is supportive of an amateur practising skills that the ship's officers remember as central to their profession but rarely use. If you can find someone sufficiently interested in your endeavours, you will likely also have found a captain who would take you aboard even though his ship does not routinely take passengers. (Though insurance considerations, labour organizations, company policies and much else now restrict the flexibility that captains once enjoyed.) Another alternative would be to volunteer for a trip on a Department of Fisheries & Oceans research vessel. They are more picky than they used to be about who they will take but you might find a way to get accepted for a survey of the Gulf waters around PEI. The down sides would be frequent course changes confusing your DR plot and the requirement to stand two 6-hour watches per day helping process the catch. That would cut into your time for taking sights. Another suggestion (and one I am seriously considering for the near future) would be to take a trip on one of the "tall ships" (a horrible term!). Those take trainees as fo'c'sle hands and do not expect them to navigate, nor is there necessarily much space for chart work. However, most of them do not demand that their trainees do anything in particular, so if you want to spend your day taking sights you likely could. With a bit of luck, the officers would be supportive enough to feed you the DR information you would need. You would, of course, need to select the right ship and you would also need to choose a blue-water voyage. (Most "tall ships" hug the coast because they make their money by showing up in ports, not by spending time at sea.) Right about now, "Europa" is making a 10-week voyage from Atlantic Canada to Ushaia, the southernmost port in Argentina. That would have made for a great CN experience, though a long time to abandon job and family. During the southern summer, she is set to go from Ushaia to Cape Town via the Antarctic peninsula, South Georgia and Trista da Cunha in 7 weeks. Sometime soon, "Stadt Amsterdam" (a near-copy of "Cutty Sark") should be crossing from the Netherlands to the Caribbean, returning from some port in New England next spring. The return trip shouldn't take more than 3 weeks (the record under square rig is about 12 days). "Kruzenshtern", the big Russian four-master, does a couple of round trips to the Canaries each year, taking (I think) a month or so each way from some port in western Europe. Or you can search the Web for "crew wanted" listings for yachts doing ocean crossings. The limitation of any or all of these, of course, is that you won't really be navigating: the safety of the vessel will not depend on on your skills and judgement, so you can go through the routine of making your sights and plotting them up but it will only be a routine, missing much of the finer points of the real thing. As pilots say of landing a simulator instead of an aeroplane -- it's about as exciting as kissing your own sister. Trevor Kenchington P.S.: On a practical note, you wrote: > I would use digital watches that I calibrated on shore for > several months prior to leaving on the trip. My every-day digital watch maintains a very steady rate at home (unfortunately a little faster than it should!) but it seems to gain when flying in the reduced pressure of an airliner's cabin -- or maybe when exposed to tropical heat after long flights. You may want to calibrate your watches across some flights or else get daily checks on GPS time (which is no more of a cheat than using radio time signals, which were standard for several decades before mid-ocaen radio navigation became available). -- Trevor J. Kenchington PhD Gadus@iStar.ca Gadus Associates, Office(902) 889-9250 R.R.#1, Musquodoboit Harbour, Fax (902) 889-9251 Nova Scotia B0J 2L0, CANADA Home (902) 889-3555 Science Serving the Fisheries http://home.istar.ca/~gadus