Overview

Boat Navigation for the Rest of Us (1995) grew out of the observation that what works on the kitchen table or in the chartroom of an oil tanker may not work in the bouncing cockpit of a small boat. It is the only book to teach navigation the way experienced small-boat skippers actually navigate: by combining data from modern electronic devices such as GPS and radar with visual observations, simple chartwork, and commonsense piloting skills essentially unchanged since the 19th century. The reader learns everything that more formal tomes have to teach on the science of navigation, but along the way gains a whole toolbox of little-known tricks and shortcuts to deal with real-life situations without a slide rule. The strong sales of the first edition indicate that his approach is a welcome change. Important developments in marine navigation, particularly in the area of electronic navigation, call for a revised edition. Since 1995, GPS has largely displaced the Loran-C system, to which Brogdon devoted a fair amount of space in the first edition. In May 2000 the federal government discontinued Selective Availability, the longstanding practice of deliberately degrading the accuracy of civilian GPS units. As a result the accuracy of a GPS fix has improved dramatically and the current differential GPS system will probably become marginal. Electronic charts and plotting systems have exploded in the last 5 years, and are having a profound impact on small-boat navigation. By interfacing the GPS with a chart plotter or laptop computer, a skipper can now monitor the boat's progress in real time across an electronic version of the paper chart. Other revisions will address the discontinuation of Satnav and Omega (pre-GPS radionavigation systems), the planned discontinuation of Loran-C, and the growing availability of navigation information over the Internet. ""This superb and amazingly comprehensive primer will take a beginner from the very basics of reading charts and using bearings, to exploring with GPS...Well-illustrated and clearly written, it stresses low-tech commonsense strategies to keep you from going bump in the night"" - Crusing World

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9780071372268

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Captain Bill Brogdon (Cape Carteret, NC) served in the U.S. Coast Guard for more than 30 years. He writes regularly for major boating magazines and has twice received the Lawton Award for the most significant contribution to boating safety through the media.

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