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Peter Fogg has mentioned "Martin Creamer", though the name he wants is
actually Marvin. C. Creamer. His achievements (if they can be regarded
as achievements) in circumnavigating, and making other voyages,
without instruments are indeed worth discussing on this list. I don't
recall them being aired here before.

This is part of what Peter wrote-

| An American called Martin Creamer has sailed a yacht around the
globe
| without using any navigational instruments. As to when: best clue is
my
| memory that the story appeared in the first issue of the magazine
'Ocean
| Navigator'. Seventies? He sealed up sextant and timepieces and all
the rest
| and stowed them up under the bow ( yes I know - not necessarily the
part of
| the boat that gets pounded the least!). Just in case.
|
| More than anything else I think it was a mental challenge in slow
motion. He
| spent months thinking about what he saw as his biggest problem:
getting
| around Cape Horn. The specific problem was how narrow the strait is,
and the
| imprecise nature of alternative methods of navigation used. Too far
north
| and he risked the traditional hazard of running into the southern
tip of
| South America: the complex mess of islands with perverse currents
and tides
| swirling around them, the whole swept with catatonic winds, often
with very
| deep water right up to the shore. Too far south and not only might
the
| weather get even worse but the risk of meeting icebergs became
exponentially
| greater. Not that far away is the most northern peninsula of
Antarctica.
|
| How did Creamer do it? The solution for that specific problem was
simple:
| shoot for the middle, avoiding all land. It worked out fine. I seem
to
| remember that a number of navigational techniques were used during
this
| circumnavigation and perhaps this is the point - that nav is not
about one
| technique or machine or tradition or necessarily any particular
other.
| Rather it is potentially about all of them. The funny thing is that
Creamer,
| who proved this in the most convincing way, had a technical
background.

For his circumnavigation, Creamer left the US late in 1982 and reports
that he rounded the Horn westbound late in 1983 so presumably returned
home some time in 1984. He addressed the annual meeting of the
Institute of Navigation in June 85, showing slides, but the account of
his talk that I have seen gives frustratingly little information about
the voyage. Perhaps details had been withheld for his proposed book on
the journey. Did that book appear, I wonder?  An article "What makes a
great navigator?" about Creamer appeared in "Navigator" journal, July
/ August 1985, and this, too, is sparse on detail about the
circumnavigation. There may well have been articles in other
publications also, about that same time.

Creamer sailed without navigational instruments. No sextant, no clock,
not even a compass. It's the absence of a compass that is so
remarkable. How did he cope when the skies, and particularly the
nights, were overcast?

As for sailing without a clock, he could have no knowwledge of his
longitude, except by estimating his daily eastward progress through
the water. That put him back into the days of latitude sailing, where
a navigator ran down a line of latitude until he reached some land on
the other side. That was used by mariners for hundreds of years,
including exploratory voyages, in which mariners had no idea what lay
ahead (at least Creamer had the advantage of modern mapping). There's
considerable risk involved in sailing that way, not knowing how close
you may be to the other side of an ocean, and it calls for great
alertness and cautionary sailing; perhaps at night heaving-to, or
shortening sail, or sailing off and on a likely coast ahead.
Foolhardy, in this safety-conscious era, certainly, but if Creamer and
his two crew were prepared to take the risk, that was up to them.
Latitude sailing was no great achievement.

But how did Creamer get his latitudes, without a sextant? He estimated
heights of the Sun, above the horizon; declination of a star, that was
near the zenith. He would lie on his back, on deck, and try to
estimate which star was vertically above. An unlikely procedure on a
heeling yacht, I would think. For travel through the Drake passage
round the Horn, aiming to steer a path between the Horn and the ice
(and presumably hoping to avoid Diego Ramirez, right in the way), he
estimated latitude from the degree of twilight that was apparent at
Summer midnight!

He makes rather extravagant claims for the precision of his latitude
estimates, but these are belied in the account, in "Navigator", of his
approach to Australia. "But when he turned North off his parallel of
latitude", we're told, "in search of what he hoped would be Tasmania,
he and his crew suddenly found themselves closing on the barren,
hostile shore of the southwest Australian coast, almost 1,000 miles
west of Tasmania. Creamer had apparently been in the East Australian
Current". There may be journalistic error in that account, of course.
We can forgive Creamer that 1,000 mile error in longitude, but what on
Earth was he doing in that latitude, about 9 degrees or 500 miles
north of his intended destination?.

So I am not over-impressed with Creamer's navigational achievements,
and hope his example will never be followed. His bravery is
unquestioned.

================

Peter Fogg, always ready to offer advice, gives us the following gem-

|One helpful method he used belongs to celestial navigation. Without
any
| instrument. If a zenith body can be found and identified then the
boat's
| position is known.

No, it isn't. Not unless you know the time. How do you get that,
without any instrument? Without the time, all you have is latitude.
Which negates much of what follows, from Peter.

George

contact George Huxtable at george@huxtable.u-net.com
or at +44 1865 820222 (from UK, 01865 820222)
or at 1 Sandy Lane, Southmoor, Abingdon, Oxon OX13 5HX, UK.

   

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