Sharing your boating thoughts and opinions
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Kill cord safety
We’re always being told to fit the kill cord to our outboard motors when in use but I wonder if this is always the safest thing to do. While driving my dinghy with a 2.5hp outboard and one passenger it struck me that if I fell overboard the dinghy’s inertia would carry it away from me and my passenger would not be able to use the motor to come and pick me up.
If there was a strong wind or tide running the passenger might find it difficult to row the dinghy hard enough to collect me.
If I’d not been connected to the kill cord and the passenger is aware of being the backup helm they’d be able to use the motor. The kill cord must be connected to the driver if they are single-handed of course.
Vote for electronic navigation
Being an ‘Ancient Mariner’, with possibly the last DOT Ocean Yachtmaster before the RYA took it over, and having taught the RYA Yachtmaster course in its early years, I might be expected to agree with Jacqueline Spalding’s objection to the disappearance of paper charts (PBO, July 2024). But that’s not necessarily the case.
As far as the reliability of electronic navigation is concerned, multiple devices will often be on board–we had six phones and tablets running Navionics and one running raster charts on a recent trip from Fambridge to Inverness and we could have run for days without the boat’s power.
The cost of a full set of Admiralty charts for that trip would have paid for the refurbished rugged tablet preloaded with charts bought via visitmyharbour.com or around £40 a year buys a subscription to Navionics that can be loaded on any number of devices, and route planning copies to them all as long as you have a wifi connection. So no, paper is not cheaper unless you just sail in one small area.
But the main issue I’d like to emphasise is the separation between GPS and electronic charts–the screen and the chart it shows have nothing to do with GPS, the GPS merely shows you where you are on the chart and where you are heading. The production of both electronic and paper charts uses identical datasets and skills. Some electronic charts–raster charts–are in principle just scans of paper charts while vector charts present the data in a less familiar way.
There is no way for dastardly external agents to interfere with your electronic charts– they are located in your devices –only the GPS is vulnerable. The possibility of loss of GPS, as happened in the Baltic recently does, however, rais
