Starts:

Saturday February 05, 2022

    2:30 PM

5 February 2022 Passage Planning Program

Register through the sign-up link above

     This session will be held at 1430 on Saturday, 5 February, and will focus on a one day passage to Shelter Island Yacht Club. That club, which is located in Dering Harbor, is one of the nicest destinations in New England, with a great deck on the water from which one can view the club’s spectacular fleet of Herreshoff 12 1/2s. In fact, SHYC will do a cruise to Shelter Island this summer from 20 to 23 July.

    This session will be all about current sailing. While our first session involved currents and the seas they can kick up with an opposing wind, the current was either on the bow or stern. Its effect on the speed over ground was significant but obvious. In this session, we will be dealing with a cross current, discussing traditional and electronic means of coping with current sailing.

   Our hypothetical passage will begin in Stonington at 0900 EDST on 23 September 2021. We will proceed through Lords Passage to G1 near the Ruins at the entrance to Gardiners Bay, and then on to Shelter Island. Our vessel is a sailboat and our boat speed will be 7 knots. If you want, you might plot the course to G1 using a point near the mark at Constellation Rock as the first waypoint after clearing Lords Passage. Take a look at the current and current charts in Eldridge or other sources. What course would you steer per your steering compass? (A deviation card for the boat can be located HERE) What time do you expect to get to the waypoint and when to the yacht club?

    After one hour into the track from Lords Passage, you take the following bearings with your hand bearing compass: Bartlett Reef 330 degrees magnetic, Race Rock 48 degrees magnetic and Little Gull 262 degrees magnetic. Where are you and why are you there? (This is a mechanical navigation question, not an existential question.) 

   If you don’t have a chance to think about the hypothetical before the session, that’s no problem. We’ll walk through it.  We look forward to seeing you for what we hope will be a fun and hopefully interesting event.