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Navigation: Leave Your Compass at Home and Use Handrails and Fences
Although it’s best to always have a compass with you, if you have a detailed chart or map, you don’t always need to use it when you’re navigating. If you use handrails, fences (also call catches) and checkpoints during the day, you needn’t check your compass often. Handrails and fences are techniques and features that do exactly what they sounds like they do; you follow a handrail and a fence keeps you in. A checkpoint is just like a checkpoint on a road or race. It’s a known point on the chart. A handrail is a feature or landmark that leads towards your destination and one that you can follow or…
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Why didn’t the kayaker cross the road? Ferry angles in kayaking
The Seven Mile Bridge in the Florida Keys connects the Middle Keys to the Lower Keys. Under the bridge, the water is shallow, and it seems like the 1,000 square miles of the Florida Bay flows through the opening on the tide generating up to 4 knot currents. In a kayak, the current is swift enough to push you out to sea on an ebb tide or into the bay on flood. The common practice in a situation such as this is to find a ferry angle that prevents you from drifting out to sea and this is also a common practice with preventing leeway in cross winds. This is…
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Free Boundary Waters Canoe Area GPS Data: Campsites and Portages
The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is a million acre wilderness area in northern Minnesota established to protect pristine boreal forests and historic and recreational canoe routes. It has over 1,000 lakes and 2,000 campsites. If you use a GPS unit, finding GPS data for BWCA campsites and portages was difficult. Now, you can get that GPS data for free. If you’ve read my Free Garmin Topo Maps article you know the basic procedure. If you don’t here it is: You need to download several maps to make this work: BWCA Campsite and Portages Map: This has all the portages and campsites as of 2009. This will change a bit…
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Canoe and Kayak Navigation Articles
Over the past few years, I’ve written articles about both canoe navigation and kayak navigation. I based the articles on the navigation classes I teach with the premise that navigation shouldn’t be confusing, and it isn’t confusing once you understand the basics. To help people learn during my classes, I concentrate on the results instead of the terminology. I think it’s more important that a paddler can take a bearing with a compass, follow that bearing or plot a course than know what the difference between the terms bearing, heading and course. These articles reflect that approach. If you have a website or blog, please, feel free to link back…
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How to Print Free Canadian Topographic Maps Quickly and Inexpensively
This is a guest post from educator and wilderness guide Dave Freeman. Canadian topographic maps generally cost between $11 and $16 dollars each. When buying many maps for an extended camping trip, the costs quickly add up. Luckily, the Canadian government offers free electronic copies of all of their topo maps. By following a few simple steps you will save money and produce more useful maps by printing your own for a fraction of the cost. All you need is an Internet connection, a printer and a little time. Printing your own maps allows you to customize your maps and only print out the parts that you need. It shaves…
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Navigation: Fixes and Triangulation
When lost or slightly misplaced while kayaking or canoeing, if you have a view of a couple of landmarks you can get a fix, which is the navigational term for finding an “X” that marks the spot. The “X” is your location. The process is a quick and easy way to find your location. For a more exacting needs, finding your location with triangulation involves only one extra step. Getting a Navigation Fix First, find a line of position, which is a line that runs from a landmark to your position. You can take a bearing with your compass or find a range to get a line of position. To…
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Navigation: How to Use a Compass
When paddling, you use a compass to determine or identify courses, bearings and headings. Because the deck of a kayak or the workstation in a canoe is small, limiting the number of instruments used for navigation speeds up the process and reduces the chance of losing an item overboard. A baseplate compass combines a protractor with a bearing compass, and it fits inside a lifevest. Learning how to use one simplifies the process of navigation. Parts of a Compass Index line: Read the bearing in degrees at this line. In the images, the index line read 43 degrees. Direction of travel arrow: This points towards the bearing. Use the arrow…
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Navigation: Variation and Declination
A compass needle seldom points directly to the north pole, because Earth’s magnetic fields pull the compass needle towards what is known as magnetic north. Because the angle between true north, the direction from you towards the north pole, and magnetic north varies from place to place, we must account for that variation when navigating. This difference is known as declination. It’s different from Magnetic Deviation, which is a local magnetic field creating an error. The terms variation and declination refer to the same feature. On a map refer to it as declination. On a chart refer to it as variation. Magnetic declination, also called variation, is the difference between…
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Navigation: Course, Bearings and Headings
The terms, course, bearing and heading, seem to cause confusion among students just learning to navigate. Although, it’s possible to navigate without knowing the meaning of each term, having a common language allows us to discuss navigation more effectively. While I’m sure that you could come up with a rhyme to help you learn these terms, I think it’s best just to take time to memorize and internalize the meanings. Course A course is your planned paddling route. It’s usually marked on a map, although you can also just make a mental note. A course can be a straight line going from your point of departure to your destination, or…
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Navigation: Read a Marine Chart Part 2
This is part two in a two-part article about learning the basics of reading a marine chart. Part one, Navigation: Read a Marine Chart Part 1, covered reading the basics discovered at first glance, like the chart’s scale, name and variation. This part is about the specific symbols on a chart, like water depths, lights, buoys, underwater features and more. Although there are more symbols than found in this article on a chart, learning to read these basic symbols will help you while studying others. For most paddlers, these will be plenty. Soundings The numbers that appear all over the water portions of the chart are soundings. They show how…
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Navigation: Read a Marine Chart Part 1
Learning how to read a marine chart is an important part of learning to navigate. A chart, like a map, represents the real world projected onto paper. It helps you figure out where you’ve been, where you’re going, where you’re at and what to expect at each point along the way. There are lots of symbols on a chart, but, for novice kayakers and canoeists, knowing the main features is most important. After learning the basics, the rest come easily with some study. In this two-part article, part one covers the basics like finding the chart’s name, number, scale, variation and other important items to discover at first glance. Part…
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NOAA Marine Chart Converter
NOAA makes its marine charts available for free to the public, but those charts come in a BSB format. If you want to manipulate the marine charts on your computer, unless you hack the file, you have to use a computer program designed to read the BSB format. To make the charts usable in any graphics program or to print your own NOAA charts, you need to convert them from the native BSB format to a graphics format like PNG, JPEG or TIFF. In the past, you had to use NOAA’s somewhat confusing tool or a command-line hack. Bob Webster, feeling our pain, programed an open-source BSB converter. It converts…
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Navigation: Ranges
When paddling, if you line up two features — artificial or natural — you have the makings of a range. A range is a type of line of position that can help you stay on course or help you find your position on the map (think of a line of position as an imaginary line that runs between you and an other point. It helps you find your position on the map). For a range, imagine a line that runs from the two lined-up features to your boat. As long as the two features remain lined up, you are somewhere along that imaginary line. If you can find those features…
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Navigation: Aiming Off
When you’re paddling to a destination located somewhere along a nondescript shoreline, it’s easy to miss your target even if you took an exact bearing. There are lots of reasons why this might happen, some of those reasons include wind or current pushing you off course, lack of attention, slight inaccuracy in your compass reading or maybe magnetic deviation. But, the truth is that it’s hard to end up at an exact location without a visual clue. In situations like this, use a technique called aiming off to make sure you end up at your desired destination. How to Aim Off To aim off, you deliberately set a course off…
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Understanding Magnetic Deviation
Magnetic forces contained within your kayak can cause your compass to read an incorrect bearing. This type of error is known as magnetic deviation. With 1 degree of compass error, over a mile, you’ll end up about 92 feet away from your destination. If your deviation is extreme like shown in the image, you could completely miss your target by over 1.7 miles on a 10 mile crossing. Worse still, deviation varies as you turn your kayak. For example, you might have a negative 10 degree error when pointing northwest, but that might change to a positive three when pointing southwest. Making a chart showing the deviation error at each…
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