Hi, this advice comes from spending about 800 hours in the last year travelling to new places every day. It does not apply to leaving your home dock and cruising around your home waters for a day. These procedures are not really needed in the canals or ICW (which is why those places are like taking a vacation and offshore passages are like real work). First of all I would only want my autopilot to steer a course I dialed in, I believe an interface to the GPS is dangerous for several reasons. The correct way to plan a daily run in unfamilar waters is to lay out course lines on the paper or electronic chart. Measure distances and bearings. Calculate travel times on each leg. Computer charts really help with this, and in my opinion is their only real use on the vessel. You write down the waypoints, course, and travel times in your log, with their name and number. You must be prepared for total electronics failure (though it never happened on our cruise, we did lose one of the 2 computers). You then enter these waypoints in your GPS, double checking all the coordinates. It is very easy to get the minutes reversed (ie. enter 21 instead of 12) or to make some other error. Very easy! Once I even entered the wrong degrees of lattitude (45 instead of 46 - but with the right minutes). Enter waypoints for alternate destinations you may use because of weather or trouble. It is almost impossible to take a waypoint off a chart, enter it in the GPS and steer to an alternate harbor/anchorage at sea in the middle of a storm. You will be nervous enough in these conditions. If you have preplanned your alternates you will be much more ready to make the decision to abort and head for one of them (we needed to do this literally hundreds of times). You will not neglect this after your first unexpected storm at sea! Now you have all your waypoints in the GPS and your partner has helped you double check when you entered them. We always did this the night before a passage, it is part of our standard drill for getting ready. It takes about 1 to 2 hours and, for us, was a duty best not left for the morning of the departure. We had a GPS chart plotter and that helped you check your common sense when entering the points. Even with all this checking, the greatest cause of error was in entering a bad waypoint, that is a sound reason not to trust the autopilot to steer you to the point. We also learned to use the "Route" feature of the GPS. Most people don't do this. The reason to do it is because you are going to have lots of waypoints on your screen. You'll have your course plus the alternates. You'll have yesterdays. It is too easy to make a mistake at sea and pick the wrong one as your next waypoint. You end up approaching an alternate harbor or taking a shortcut through a shoal instead of around it, because you are steering to waypoint 122 not 121. That is the reason I also have written down in my log the waypoint names and numbers I am supposed to use (along with the distances, courses, and travel times). Each time we reach a waypoint and turn to the next I mark off the time in my log. Another reason is lots of times I had entered a waypoint I never intended to actually go to. The waypoint was on the outer edge of a shoal and my plan was to leave it to my port (or starboard). I wanted to know the range and bearing to the hazard at all times as I approached. Given this, if we had a change of helm, I always told them what to steer magnetic, what waypoint, and what our strategy was (even if I was just going below for a minute). It is part of the cermony of handing over the helm. Let me add to ALWAYS use the Mark function on your GPS to mark the center of the channel of the harbor as you are leaving! Using your own equipment is the most accurate way to enter a point. If you have to return, you can steer for this waypoint. Don't neglect planning for an abort. If you have to abort and return to port it will be at least in difficult, if not dangerous conditions. We also use a highlighter pen to mark on the charts our course. I started out highlighting the course I planned to take for the day, but soon began only to highlight as we ran. When running a course with dozens of waypoints between islands, shoals, channels, and passages you have never seen before, it is VITAL to know exactly where you are at all times. We advanced the highlight at every waypoint, bouy, or recognisable landmark. This is very hard to do by yourself. Usually Karen had the charts and highlighter, me the helm. Other cruisers used paper stickers so they could re-use their charts but we figured we would just get different color highlighters. In spending a year watching the GPS for 5 to 10 hours per day, I observed very high relability. I never noticed any freezes, but I did once in a while notice a big swing in my indicated bearing, and constant variability in my indicated speed. Ignore it. I always steer to the magnetic compass. The GPS only updates once per 2 seconds and if you steer to this you will be constantly "hunting" the course. Your magnetic compass updates constantly, and can not ever fail do to a power outage or some electrical problem. Every day, every route we were prepared to hand steer to the compass and make it safely. We have children aboard, we can't take any risks. All landfalls and harbors must be approached visually, not on instruments. Once you get within 3 miles the GPS becomes less important. Now it is time to begin carefully scanning the land with your binoculars. Karen liked the 7x but I prefered the 15x. Anyways, you now have to take care of local conditions which are not on the charts and you can't 100% trust the guidebooks (although an aerial color photograph of the harbor is worth it's weight in gold). Watching local boats and reading bouy numbers and comparing them against your charts is the best way to make your final approach. Plan for uncharted shoals due to dredging, rocks, and new or moved bouys. Plus call the harbor or marina and asking directions of course! By the way, so many do NOT answer their VHF but get the phone on the first ring. So in the approach, ignore that waypoint! It is not going to be in the actual correct position for entering the harbor. No matter where you got the coordinate. They are placed so that you can get close enough for a safe visual approach. Even if you got it off the chart or from the guidebook. (The only one correctly placed is the one you entered last time you were in the approach to this harbor as I advised above). On 90% of the Great Circle + Bahamas you would be hand steering anyways. The autopilot can steer better than either of us, but I can give a more comfortable ride by compensating for waves and wakes. It gives something to do, I take pleasure in controlling the boat, and you better be able to do it if the autopilot fails. On the long Bahamas passages the autopilot would be nearly essential. By the way, I always enter a waypoint at least every hour. It is too dangerous to have waypoints 20 to 50 miles or more apart because you may have overlooked something, and a run of that long a time may make you complacent. Having the waypoint alarm beeping every hour gives you something important to look forward to and adds to your sense of progress, plus forces you to update the log. This got us 4600 miles through new waters with no accidents. Jim Baumgart 760-749-4257 Starrstuff, Inc. Office 760-822-7827 Cell

Far be it from me to argue with 4600 accident free miles, but I use a modification of his procedure and believe it is worth consideration. In the evening I plot the next days course on a computer course. I then power up my handheld GPS, erase all the waypoints in it, and download the waypoints for the next days run. If I'm feeling especially paranoid, I also print out a copy of the next days run directly from the computer generated data. Note that what I don't do is to ever copy any numbers by hand and then enter them in another instrument! Before computers I did this and a couple of times it led to potentially serious trouble when digits were reversed, etc. When underway the next day, I run using VNS w/ vector based charts fed by a fixed DGPS without a direct link to the autopilot (!) and with the handheld GPS kept as backup for the system. So far, so good. Tom At 09:18 AM 4/28/2001 -0700, Jim Baumgart wrote: >The >correct way to plan a daily run in unfamilar waters is to lay out course >lines on the paper or electronic chart. Measure distances and bearings. >Calculate travel times on each leg. Computer charts really help with this, >and in my opinion is their only real use on the vessel. You write down the >waypoints, course, and travel times in your log, with their name and >number. You must be prepared for total electronics failure (though it >never happened on our cruise, we did lose one of the 2 computers). You >then enter these waypoints in your GPS, double checking all the >coordinates. It is very easy to get the minutes reversed (ie. enter 21 >instead of 12) or to make some other error. Very easy! Once I even >entered the wrong degrees of lattitude (45 instead of 46 - but with the >right minutes).

At 09:18 AM 4/28/01 -0700, you wrote: >Hi, this advice comes from spending about 800 hours in the last year >travelling to new places every day. It does not apply to leaving your home >dock and cruising around your home waters for a day. These procedures are >not really needed in the canals or ICW (which is why those places are like >taking a vacation and offshore passages are like real work). > >First of all I would only want my autopilot to steer a course I dialed in, >I believe an interface to the GPS is dangerous for several reasons. The >correct way to plan a daily run in unfamilar waters is to lay out course >lines on the paper or electronic chart. Measure distances and bearings. >Calculate travel times on each leg. Computer charts really help with this, >and in my opinion is their only real use on the vessel. You write down the >waypoints, course, and travel times in your log, with their name and >number. You must be prepared for total electronics failure (though it >never happened on our cruise, we did lose one of the 2 computers). You >then enter these waypoints in your GPS, double checking all the >coordinates. It is very easy to get the minutes reversed (ie. enter 21 >instead of 12) or to make some other error. Very easy! Once I even >entered the wrong degrees of lattitude (45 instead of 46 - but with the >right minutes). =============================================================== Etc. etc. etc.etc. etc.etc. etc.etc. etc.etc. etc.etc. etc. You are a pretty busy guy Jim, you've got to go for a cruise with me an rest up. . Captain Al Pilvinis "M/V Driftwood"--Prairie 47 2630 N.E. 41st Street Lighthouse Point, Fl 33064-8064 Voice 954-941-2556 Fax 954 788-2666 Email yourcaptain@earthlink.net Website http://home.earthlink.net/~yourcaptain