A Tall Ship and a Star to Steer Her By

A Tall Ship and a Star to Steer Her By

That is probably one of the most famous lines from any Sea poem/story.  I always thought it meant using the stars to navigate with. That is, in the sense of figuring out where you are and how to get to where you want to go. Last night I finally figured out what it really means.

One of the things I was told on my previous voyage was to use clouds or objects on the horizon to steer with rather than chasing the pointer on the compass around.  I was never able to make that work.  My second time at helm on this trip, while sailing along Lk Ontarion,  Mark the Aussie AB on our watch told me pointing at the compass "Don't look at this, look at this" indicating with a sweep of his arm the broad expanse of stars and sky.  I still wasn't able to force myself not to look at the compass and try to chase the course around.

Last night however it seems to have clicked. The Fog blanked everything up to about 45 degrees above the horizon but above that the stars were pretty clear. So I found a bright star, in Cassiopea I think, that was lined up between two stays on the main mast when we were on course.  Watching that star I could see when the ship started to fall off her course. Looking down at the compass I could see that the compass heading hadn't changed at all! Then suddenly it would begin to show the course change.

That is the secret! The compass is on the quarter deck right in front of the wheel it will only start to register the turn when the bow has already started going that way.  The apparent motion of the star, or a cloud or point of land, is way faster so correcting the ship course by watching for the shift in these objects corrects the course before the compass has even registered a turn.

The fog this morning was so thick you could actually look at the sun briefly, it was just a bright disk, I used it the same way as a star to figure out how many spokes of the wheel were necessary to make her turn or stop turning.

Sweet.

So "a star to steer her by"  is just that, using a star to keep the ship on course because the relative motion of the ship forward of the compass registers a change in course way faster than the compass does.

Thanks for reading.
KJ