Cherbourg this way!

Published 10:56 on 11 Jun 2025 by Stephen Fraser

With the Cherbourg Solstice rally not far off, here are some memories of navigating in the Channel.

My photo shows the chart which has, until recently, been on my various chart tables over the years, since my first singlehanded crossing in my Achilles 24 Dove II in 2001. Plotting hourly positions from a handheld GPS was already less of a luxury by then, compared with the approximation of earlier methods, and the chart was soon filled up with pencilled crosses marked with the time, so that I could compare progress with previous trips.

A note from that first trip, however, suggests the challenge – Since tea-time all Id been able to do was grab a quick look at the GPS with the tiller in one hand and the spinnaker sheet in the other…, which continued for around five hours!

As trip succeeded trip, I had to start erasing previous positions, which began to give the water a paler hue; I drew the rhumb lines and squares in as a way of plotting roughly in a hurry, which worked ok. Once I could tell more or less where I was from the GPS coordinates themselves (N050 degrees being about halfway and therefore lunchtime!), the chart became less essential; I then also began to learn to identify landmarks from the cloud above them Dartmoor, the Purbeck, the Channel Islands and La Hague, and so to use a kind of navigation which was common in the Iron Age, long before the compass!

The Channel has its own landscape, too, depending on the tide; there is, for instance, on a spring flood tide a zone of distinctive turbulence north of where the EC1 buoy used to be, and the beginning of the afternoon ebb is immediately noticeable anywhere in the change in the waves to windward when the wind is SW. A few miles off Cherbourg this creates another turbulent zone, which is useful in poor visibility as a rough guide.

Navionics has made us all experts, but reduced our natural learning at the same time; there is much to be understood from just looking at the sea and the sky

Steve Fraser

Last updated 10:56 on 11 June 2025