Tracks

When I started ocean sailing, back in the proverbial day, you used your sextant or radio direction finder or LORAN receiver to plot your position at least daily - but often no more frequently than that. Once the daily position was marked, you then drew a pencil line from your last plotted position, and voila, that was the course and distance you'd sailed. A two-week trip so marked resembled one of those connect-the-numbered-dots diagrams you'd find in a green-covered edition of Children's Highlights, lying on the 1980s table of every dentist and pediatrician in America.

With kids, jobs, soccer games and rowing practice, ocean sailing took a long-time hiatus from my life, but in the summer of 2001, with a little time on my hands, I helped a friend sail his lovely and eminently ocean-capable sloop from his home on the Eastern Shore to Bermuda and then back again. I quickly discovered that things had changed in the position tracking department. By 2001, nautical charts had moved from paper to the computer screen, and GPS had replaced the quaint sextant. In addition, marine engineers had figured out how to plot one's GPS position as a continuous set of points onto the electronic chart. No more the point-to-point pencil lines, the jagged corners and impossibly straight lines of imperfectly recorded movements over the course of a voyage. By 2001, one's course, or track, as it had come to be known, inscribed a lovely continuous flowing line on a glowing screen at the navigator's table, along with data displays of distance traveled, speed over ground, and other sundry bits of useful information. Moving from analog to digital, from discrete quanta to continuous data seems the way of the world, but at the time, I missed the tactile experiences of figuring out one's position and then carefully denoting the boat's position on the durable paper of a nautical chart. In fact, I recall doing just that, and, against the advice of the electronic data and charts, advised my friend, erroneously it turns out, to sail a line further south than we needed to, thus extending unnecessarily the length of our outbound trip. So much for the old days.

All's well that ended well, to be sure, and on that trip I came to appreciate the value of knowing exactly where one is, and where one's been, and to let go of the reliance on those silly position and course approximations of a bygone era. Certainly anyone forced to navigate treacherous passages time and again has come to appreciate the safety of relying on earlier trips, retracing recorded tracks proven by experience to avoid the nasty shoal or the poorly-charted rock. And one certainly becomes a better helmsman, seeing precisely the track of an upwind leg, able to correlate the point of sail with the resulting speed made good to the next mark. But tracks also represent the immutable history of a boat's course through the water, a history that sometimes leaves the captain in the awkward position of "doing a bit of 'splaining," as Ricky Ricardo might have demanded of Lucille Ball. For tracks are stubborn things.

My first exposure to the stubbornness of tracks came on that 2001 trip to Bermuda, when we woke after our first night sailing - this would have been heading south down the shipping lanes of the Chesapeake. That morning, after an otherwise uneventful night, the track laid bare Terry's - it would have been me, had I drawn the night watch -- struggles to disentangle the many buoy channel lights from the many navigational lights on the steady stream of ships bound to and from the port of Baltimore. In daytime it can be tough to avoid the shoals and the ships at the same time, but at night, the constellation of lights in the lower Chesapeake can be downright baffling. Small boats like ourselves often find themselves dodging ships and shoals, darting first east and then west, speeding up to squeeze through a gap in the traffic, or slowing down to let a tanker pass. Bottom line? The morning track showed we'd done at least one 360 degree turn, trying to make sense of the lights and traffic. In the good old days, the circular maneuver would have been lost to history, a forgotten episode on a trip that would have otherwise been noted on the chart as a straight-line passage from the dinner position to the breakfast position. In 2001, however, the track proved a stubborn thing. (Of course, the trip's final track also "proved" that my routing advice to Bermuda was seriously flawed, so my friend and I have tacitly agreed not to discuss either experience in mixed company.)

On our circumnavigation, some ten years after that initial introduction to tracks, we've had a number of instances where our navigational prowess-and I use the term loosely - has been memorialized by our system's tracks, and it's useful, in the spirit of keeping our egos in check, to recall a few of these. My personal favorite came when I sailed ile de Grace from Bali to Gili Air, a small island across the narrow Indonesian Lombok Strait, a channel characterized by extremely heavy tidal currents. On the day in question, I watched with dismay as our speed over ground slowed to just a few knots, despite having both engines at maximum RPMs. On close examination, as I zoomed in on my chart display, I discovered not only was the boat moving slowly through the water, its bow headed northeast, but it was moving backward -- sliding to the southwest at 2 knots. In a state of disbelief at a current of some 8 knots, I peeled out of the fastest part of the tidal stream, turned the boat to the southeast, and managed to ride the current eastward to the lee of a mid-channel island. The track doesn't lie: paying little heed to the current, I managed to move the boat backwards with the engines in forward.

A more consequential experience was the time we entered a Fijian bay after a grueling passage from Tonga. Our track shows us entering the bay, steering toward its center, and then pushing ahead into waters clearly marked on the electronic chart as being too shallow for our boat. However, we were so focused on positioning our boat relative to other already-anchored boats, and focusing on the murky water that we missed the electronic data. A few hours on the rocks, no lasting damage except to our egos, and a useful learning experience, still memorialized on our track.

Readers may recall the several instances where, in the process of raising, reefing, or dousing a sail, we elected or managed to motor the boat in a complete circle - normally not an issue, except when one's fishing lines are left astern, slack and busy wrapping themselves around our spinning props. Again, our tracks reveal the 360 degree path of the boat, followed by the inevitable squiggles of a drifting boat as I've jumped overboard to cut loose the tangled monofilament line from our props.

More recently, in our first day crossing the South Atlantic a few days ago, we were caught off guard by the strange nighttime movements of a large fishing boat just northwest of Cape Town - taking evasive action, our track, shows us sailing north then west, then southwest -- at which point both of us were on deck trying to sort out how best to avoid a collision. Collision avoided, but the convoluted track still remains.

Finally, in an example of how tracks can help maintain a sense of integrity on a circumnavigation, we used our earlier track of entering Cape Town harbor to assure that Jennifer's circumnavigation will be a true and complete circumnavigation. I had taken the boat from Cape Town to Saldanha Bay, about 60 miles north, for some engine work while Jennifer attended to land-based responsibilities. Thus, she "missed" that part of our trip. In leaving South Africa, we decided to sail together back to Cape Town, cross our earlier arrival track that had been recorded for posterity's sake, and then turn northwest for St. Helena. Thus, our track shows conclusively that Jennifer and I, together, sailed every inch of every mile from Annapolis to our present position, with no gaps.

It is a circumnavigator's goal to "cross one's outbound track." That's what makes it a circumnavigation. It doesn't "count" if you leave from, say, England, sail through the Panama Canal, across the Pacific and Indian Oceans, round the Cape of Good Hope, and make final landfall in Brazil. You've sailed through every line of longitude, but you have not, strictly speaking, circumnavigated. I'm not sure who makes these rules, but it's also, technically, not a circumnavigation if you don't cross the equator twice. No fair circling Antarctica and calling it an around-the-world trip. We crossed the equator just this side of the Galapagos, and will cross it for the second time on our passage from St. Helena to the Caribbean.

We expect to cross our original departure track somewhere in the Bahamas, when we sail, God willing and the sea don't fall, across our 2010 course of ile de Grace's first passage from Fort Lauderdale to the Caribbean Sea. It'll probably be in the vicinity of Georgetown, in the Exumas, where we spent a few lovely days at anchor getting ready for our trip to Panama. Wherever we cross our line, as the expression goes, our not-so-newfangled charts will show a thin red line crossing an older thin red line, inscribed several years and many adventures ago, when our dream was still just a dream.

Tracks are stubborn things. This trip has taken more than a little perseverance - in its planning, launch, and, not least, in its execution. You can say that circumnavigators are also stubborn types - we have to be, with the sea, weather, and circumstance throwing up so many obstacles to completion. So yes - we're stubborn creatures, and yes, we've come to appreciate - even laugh at - the equally stubborn things called tracks, because even though they have recorded some forgettable moments, they are also memorializing an unforgettable experience.