Finding your way to land after an emergency at sea
Statistically, you’re never likely to have to use emergency navigation. It’s needed only by sailors who survive shipwrecks and find themselves cast away at sea with little or nothing in the way of navigational equipment.Nevertheless, if you know anything at all about navigation, you will find the theory of emergency navigation quite fascinating. Entire books have been written on the subject, so probably the best advice is: read about it now; worry about it when it happens.Much of the theory of finding your way to land without instruments, or with few instruments, is common sense based on natural phenomena every sailor experiences and understands; some of it depends entirely on luck (which instruments and tables are available to you); and the rest is deeply rooted in mathematical and celestial esoterica so profound that only a professional navigator could love it.Deep-sea voyaging involves so many different disciplines, from aerodynamics through culinary arts to mechanical engineering, that there just isn’t time in one human lifespan to plunge into all of it to any great depth. Emergency navigation is not near the top of most sailors’ priorities. Even David Burch, author of the well-respected Emergency Navigation, admits: “This book does cover the best possible ways to find your position from scratch, but, realistically, this is not a challenge we are likely to face.”If you’ve done a reasonable amount of reading, have a broad-based education in the arts and sciences, and have enough experience to attempt an ocean crossing, you should be able to find your way back to land. It might not be the nearest land if it’s a tiny coral island, but as long as you can keep going, you can hardly miss the continents.Given the options, most sailors would rather devote their time to studying deep-sea survival techniques than emergency navigation. The ability to catch fish and plankton and gather fresh water is probably at least as important as knowing your position, if not more so.This in no way diminishes the

Using a kamal. The rectangular piece of wood subtends a known vertical angle (determined empirically) when held a given distance from your eye. A knotted string from the wood to your cheekbone establishes that distance; increase the distance and you decrease the vertical angle measured. With the base of the wood aligned to the horizon, you can measure the vertical angle, or declination, of the sun or a star.

value of reading books on emergency navigation, nor the additional interest and satisfaction they can bring to a voyage. Navigation is a pleasing art when you have mastered it, and familiarity with such fundamental instruments as a sextant and a pair of parallel rules gives you a wonderfully intimate sense of connection to close-knit generations of mariners stretching back through the centuries.So, in anticipation of the day when you have to abandon ship or the day when a computer glitch deactivates all the GPS satellites, buy a book on emergency navigation, read it carefully, and tuck it away in your abandon-ship bag together with a small compass and a plastic sextant.If you find yourself in dire straits, you can rig a makeshift sextant from a printed compass rose from a chart and a piece of plastic or plywood. Or you can make a kamal, an astonishingly simple device of wood and string that is very efficient at measuring small angles. Arab navigators were using kamals to navigate the Indian Ocean 500 years before Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and still use them on dhows to this day.See also Abandoning Ship; Castaways; Danger Angles; Danger Bearings; Dead Reckoning; Echo Pilotage; Estimating Angles.

---