'Sea Kayak Videos' Episode 2: Navigation 

This series is wonderful. Thanks for posting this.

I have no intention of ever sea kayaking. However, I find the series as interesting and engaging as any top-ranking shows on Netflix. It is also oddly calming.

Excellent video, I learned a lot!!

The video is aging but the content isn't. Ty!

Fantastic. I watched another of your videos a few years back and really wanted (needed) a refresher on navigation. This is so great!

Really helpful. Danke vielmals!

We did try to make it easy for everyone to understand but some things slip by. If you watch the section on crossing shipping lanes again you will see that as John Dowd reaches the designated lane he checks for approaching ships and then turns and crosses quickly at right angles to the direction of the lane. Once past the lane he resumes his previous course.

An excellent intro to sea kayak navigation. I really got a kick out of Lee's method of measuring shoreline and other distances with a pencil and piece of paper! I've spent 65 years on the ocean in everything from a 6' boat built with scrap lumber and seams sealed with liquid tar through much larger power vessels I've piloted as a professional boat captain and I've never seen that clever trick before! Although I've been using GPS for decades as a professional charter boat captain I must admit I often miss the good old fashioned ded (deduced) reckoning methods I used as a sea kayaking guide here in Maine. Just how accurate was that method? Well I come from a nautical sort of family, my uncle was the captain of a 700' oil tanker, my cousin was the captain of an 1,000' container ship, and my brother was the captain of a charter sailing vessel. All of them used very sophisticated electronic navigational equipment and were more than a bit skeptical as to just how accurately I could navigate a kayak with a compass and time/speed/distance calculator. So we set up a test. On one of those infamous pea soup fog Maine days I paddled a 21.5 mile course with 8 course changes using only those two basic tools. The fog never lifted and yet I hit every waypoint and at the end of my 7 hour journey I pulled right into the dock I'd left from. Should have seen the look on my brother's face... Truth is compared to many other vessels sea kayaks are simple as pie to navigate. The confounding variables of wind direction and speed shifts that greatly complicate sail navigation are gone, the mind numbing roar of engines is absent, and the paddler is left free to concentrate on getting to where he wants to go. Wind and current drift do at times present problems but both those can be tamed with experience. For me it's sad to see GPS taking over...another human skill lost to high tech! And GPS is not without its own difficulties. As is the case with all electronic devices, particularly those used in a salt water environment, they have been known to malfunction. Garmin, I'm told, has a file folder full of my complaint letters as a result of the numerous difficulties I've had with their devices over the past several decades. Additionally interfacing GPS data with the data on paper charts is not itself without problems. What many do not appreciate is that many of the paper charts still in use were originally drawn based upon data gathered with hand held sextants which, put politely, induced a certain margin of error into the plotting process. Many years ago I took a course in GPS navigation taught by an experienced sailer and computer scientist. Over the course of the course much was made of the absolute accuracy of GPS which at the time was 15 meters unless the Feds turned on SA. Hoping to introduce a reality check into the course I asked the instructor one night if he were willing to humor me for a moment. When he agreed to do so I asked him to draw a simple pencil line on the border of the 1:47,000 scale chart he'd been using. After he'd done that I asked him to estimate the width of that pencil line using the chart scale. His face turned slightly red as he announced that the pencil line was between 10 and 15 yards wide! In other words the pencil line was itself less precise than the theoretical accuracy of GPS! But it gets worse, much worse! Remember, please, that many charts feature shorelines, ledges, and various navigational hazards whose location was plotted using data collected with a hand held sextant on the deck of a rolling vessel and then plotted on the paper chart with a pencil whose line was 10-15 yards wide using a protractor where the index lines were themselves less than pinpoint accurate. I misspent years of my youth working for my father's land surveying company and so have a fair understanding of the realities of field accuracy. Using surveying equipment that (at least in theory) measure angles in parts of a second rather than parts of a degree it's easy to lose track of reality. So we had a hard and fast rule we followed. The rule states simply that the degree of accuracy claimed could only be as high as the degree of accuracy that could be repeated when laying out that particular point in the field. So what's all this add up to when using a GPS in the real world? Well lets just say that when attempting to correlate points on a paper chart with readings taken with a GPS all I can say is good luck with that project! For instance let's say that there is a rock you are going to pass by that is barely covered at the tide stage you are paddling. Using a pair of dividers and the chart you determine the rock's "precise" lat/lon and you input that position into your GPS. Surely this will guarantee that you won't hit the rock, right? Not so fast! Remember that the data locating that rock was obtained using a hand held sextant. That data was then plotted on a paper chart using a protractor where the line marking each degree was itself several yards wide and then drawn on the chart with a line itself 10-15 yards wide and that on a fairly large scale chart. We live in a world of technological illusions and GPS is one of them. This is not to say that they are not a reasonably accurate and dependable tool, but it helps to keep in mind that despite readings in parts of a second the actual field accuracy when used with chart data ofttimes leaves something to be desired. As they used to say on the TV cop show Hill Street Blues, "Be careful out there!" P.S. So given all this how did I manage to ace the paddle navigation test mentioned previously? Simply, maybe even humbly, put it's called "cancellation of errors." In other words for part of each leg I was off course to the north, and for part of each leg I was off course I was off to the south...the errors canceled one another and presto I hit the next mark! As with most things skill counts but luck matters!

Thank you for putting this on You Tube. All of the videos in this series helped me a great deal.

Does anyone know what dry suit he is wearing

Really helpful insight into Sea Kayaking.

Nice job! Moving on to number 3.

This is an incredibly useful video. I’m a complete novice to using charts and I plan on reading a book to supplement what I saw here. But some of the practical tips shown in the video are very useful.

This series is wonderful. Thanks for posting this.

Really useful and helpful series. Thanks for putting on RU-vid.

Wow so knowledgeable, so much to know. Thanks

very good and important informations! Many thanks for showing your expierence here! Greetings from Germany

Great series, the music reminds me of Marshall Tucker

Thank You John! Now I can see how motley I have been. Obrigado!

Really appreciated, very good materials.

Thanks a lot for sharing good practical skills.

Great video! Thanks

Excellent video !

Nice job, thanks !

Brilliant. Thanks.

You guidance for crossing a shipping channel is flawed, you are meant to to cross (paddle or stear) perpendicular to the channel, crossing it in the quickest time. Your description will involve extra time in the channel because of tidal flow, channels invariably in tidal flows by their nature.