There is a desperate need for sailors and other boaters to learn how to navigate. Some courses that I see offered are simply academic, extremely dry, and of not much practical use. On the other hand, using electronic navigation without understanding the fundamentals of navigation is destined to failures of many kinds.

As an ASA Instructor I have been teaching ASA105 – Coastal Navigation and Piloting – for many years. It is a wonderful course for learning the concepts, the principles, and the methods of classical navigation. We used paper charts, parallel rules, dividers, etc and it was a laborious, yet satisfying, enterprise. But that is not how people navigate today. At the other end of the spectrum is the modern mind which immediately says “there’s an app for that”. That is absolutely true and unfortunately, they buy one of the many available apps, install it on their phone, and off they go “navigating”, much to their peril.

I developed my Practical Navigation course to address this problem: On the one hand you have extremely important information in classical navigation that is very difficult to put into practice. On the other hand, today it is frighteningly simple – get a phone, a nav app, and a captain’s hat, and presto chango, you’re a navigator. There is a huge gap here, and I’m afraid many boaters will fall into it.

In this course we will look at practical things that we can do as sailors to take advantage of the electronics available to us, but not to get lulled into a false sense of security. We will learn the basics of classical navigation so we can understand and utilize the benefits of our electronic charts and instruments, without losing sight of their limitations.