Book Review: The Secret World of Weather by Tristan Gooley

Weather is always with us, every day, where ever we are. You'd have thought that this would mean there is nothing left for us to learn about it, but in this brilliant book I discovered that is wrong. There is much more to weather than simply clicking on an app.

Previously Tristan Gooley has written a series of books about Natural Navigation and How to Read Water (as reviewed here) and his latest is called The Secret World of Weather (UK cover above, it is different in the US).

Full disclosure Tristan's a friend of mine, but that really makes no difference to this review, for this was a fascinating read.

The book looks at the relationship between the local, such as hills, valley, rivers, plants and buildings and the weather, how they interact, changing it.

A simple example comes from the sail Tristan and I did to the Arctic Circle: we spotted the clouds above the Faroes Islands before we saw the islands themselves, until all of a sudden we were there:

This contained many examples of these, from eddies around buildings, to birds rising on thermals, to the different types of rain, to the secret laws, to the tree fan, to canopy breeze, to the wind bulge, to finding coastlines from clouds to..... so many new ideas, and then integrated into a framework.

I kept wanting to try out what I've read by looking at the sky, trying to read the clues. This is a book to come back to, to observe the natural world and then re-read the relevant sections, to learn to connect what you see with what is happening, to know what to look for.

I found myself peering at the sky, checking out the commas, the mares' tails that come down from cirrus clouds, thinking myself into the layers of the atmosphere, reading the sky as I'd read the book.

Strongly recommended!

The Vikings: Navigation

Recently Tillerman posted a comment asking how the Vikings navigated? It was a topic I had meant to address a couple of years ago when there was a British Museum exhibition about Vikings.

However the exhibition had been a major disappointment, and one of the reasons for that was it ignored topics like this one.

So how did the Vikings navigate?

One key tactic was to follow a line of latitude, which means head due east or west - and hence know where south and north are.

On a clear night the Vikings would have been able to see Polaris, but in the summer months that far north there was often no darkness, as we found when we sailed to the Arctic Circle.

During the day they could use the length of the sun's shadow if they had created a sun-dial for that latitude and month, but that didn't help on cloudy days.

So they must have had to rely on natural navigation methods, such as using glimpses of sun to measure the wave direction and use that to keep a constant course.

Other techniques were summed up in the phrase on how to reach Greenland from Norway:

From the west country sail west but keep far enough north of Shetland so that the islands are barely visible in clear weather. Stay far enough south of the Faroe Islands so that the steep, high mountains are just halfway up over the horizon. And stay far enough south of Iceland that you can't see land, but you can just about see coast-bound seabirds.

As we were to find out, that is an incredibly useful navigational instruction.

We too saw the Faroe islands from afar (see photo above) and that could indeed be used as a gauge of latitude.

What's more we spent time observing the birds, counting the numbers at the end of each hour of our watches, and we could determine the distance from the coast simply by the number and types of birds we saw.

It would be have been nice to read something about that in the British Museum exhibition, maybe see the writing quoted above or an example sundial but alas no, nothing....

Lates at the Royal Academy: Cosmic Ocean

Recently I've discovered the joys of Museum Lates. These are events which, as the name suggestions, museums and galleries across London have special late openings. But not all Lates are the same, and the Londonist web site has identified two categories:

• Museums and art galleries that open late
• Museums and art galleries that have events hosted in their spaces in the evening

I'd been to the National Gallery late before, and that had been an example of the first category, but the Royal Academy [of arts] was firmly in the second category, described by the Londonist to be grand affairs with "DJs, cocktails, bizarre performances and so much more" that sell out quickly.

I wanted to go to the Oceania exhibition anyhow so when the email for the "RA Lates: Cosmic Ocean" came round thought why not? and it turned out to be a lot of fun. Indeed, at one point I thought I might give the actual exhibition a miss and just do the event.

First up were some talks, including "A guide to ocean sailing" by Oliver Beardon of Sail Britain. He touched on navigation techniques including those used by the Polynesians such as this stick chart:

One of the focuses of Sail Britain is to highlight the danger of plastics to our ocean, and there were some slides on this include the famous ocean gyres:

I had a brief chat with him afterwards and mentioned my experience from Svalbard of finding plastic on every beach and suggested he read Tristan's book on water.

The Polynesian navigation theme continued with a pop-up (or rather blow up, given it was inflatable) planetarium that showed the southern skies and how they were used to navigate. For example, this shows how to find south:

Around the horizon you can see the 32 directions that the Polynesians used - which is just like the 32 points of the compass used in the west. As they say, great minds thing alike.

The event was described as Cosmic Ocean so as well as a inflatable planetarium there was a similar hemisphere for a video of life in the ocean:

This video was more artistic, though less informative. It had a weird 180 degree field of view and there was no sense of scale. Many of the creatures looked like they were from the deep, dark depths where here be monsters:

Some of the best bits were abstracts, like the bioluminescence creatures flickering across the globe:

It certainly made the sky => stars and sea => bioluminescence connection very vividly.

There was lots else to see, with bars selling cocktails all over the place, rooms full of plot plants like a tropical jungle, courtyard with food stands and music complete with Hawaii dancers, London Hula!!

The audience looked similar to the dancers as there'd been a strong dress-to-impress message: "cosmic constellations, stars and moons, or alternatively opt for a deep sea creature". So some came as mermaids, many had glitter on their face or fair lights in their hair. I was a bit more modest but had dug out an old space themed t-shirt.

Along with the luau in the RA Cafe there was also a talk elsewhere about its "secret" history and why it is both authentic but also not-authentic (I think; must admit only got the tail end of this talk as was waiting for the Sail Britain one).

I missed some bits, like there was what sounded like a fascinating video on Polynesian voyaging traditions called Star Travel - see the trailer for it here. Unfortunately it was 50 minutes long and I didn't have that much time. I also skipped the coral sketching class and a site-specific art-film called "Exotic Savage: The Decolonisation". I was tempted by the DJ who seemed rather good but suspect it was aimed at a younger audience - i.e. those who weren't thinking it might be time to head off home.

It was all a lot of fun, plus there was the exhibition...

Latitude 80N

Look at those numbers on the chart-plotter! Furthest north indeed.

And what does one do at 80 degrees North? Well go swimming (*), of course !











(*) ok, confession time, I didn't actually go swimming as wasn't feeling well. But would have!

Visiting the International Maritime Organisation at 70

Many times, while heading up and down the Thames, I've passed the building above, headquarters of the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), but never had a chance to visit - until last weekend.

The IMO is the United Nations specialised agency responsible for shipping which was founded 70 years ago. It covers everything from safety at sea, to communications and AIS to environmental standards, as described in this useful overview video:


Last weekend was London Open House, that annual event when buildings all over the city open their doors to members of the public, and this year was the first that the IMO building was added to the list.

I arrived early on Sunday, which was, as previously mentioned, very, very wet. We had to bring IDs, sign in and had our photos taken for a security check. After that we had a tour which took about an hour of the main parts of the building.

In particular we got to see the main meeting rooms, where representatives of 174 Member States and three Associate Members meet to discuss and agree documents including conventions. As a UN body, these documents can have treaty status, as described here.

I've spent quite a bit time in meetings of another of the UN specialised agencies so was very interested in how their working methods compared. I'm not sure how often the guides had been asked how to raise procedural points of order in meetings! Anyhow, I soon found the UK's card:

As well as the main meeting room there were a couple of smaller ones for technical committees and we got to see behind the scenes views from the translator's booths:

All over the walls there was art work gifted by some of the member states: I was particularly struck by this stick chart from Oceania:

We also got a quick look at their cafeteria with a large roof garden (which you can actually see in the photo at top) which on a fine day would have a fantastic view:

A fascinating visit to an organisation that has an impact on all sailors of crafts whether small or large (or indeed huge).

History of Navigation Conference at the National Maritime Museum

After my visit for an update on progress on the Painted Hall restoration last week, I went to the main reason for my trip to Greenwich, which was a conference on the History of Navigation at the National Maritime Museum.

Jolly interesting it was too. Over the next one and half days heard 14 or so talks about subjects as varied as:

• How to become a Hero
• A Heroic Pirate? William Dampier’s contemporary reputation and historical legacy as a navigator
• Lady Franklin in the Victorian Canon of Naval Heroism
• The weather, failure and success on Cook´s third voyage
• “It’s all Fake News!”: James Cook and the making of an 18th century media hero
• The Validity of Replica Voyages
• Charisma and Routine in Nineteenth-century Hydrography
• A century of pain and gain: chartering and opening the Torres Strait in the nineteenth century 
• ‘Plane-tabling Mitcham Common is hardly sufficient’: Instruments in the Identity of Exploration 
• A History of Navigation in the Western Desert prior to the GPS age
• Hero or Villain? The conundrum for the military in using GNSS as an aid to navigation

The one I was most interested in was of course William Dampier, that being a favourite topic of mine, and had a great chat with the author, Katherine Parker, afterwards about whether his later failings were due to drink or some tropical disease.

The most fun was the one from Vanessa Collingridge about Fake News and James Cook's voyages in which learnt a lot about the cut-throat world of journalism in those early days of newspapers in the UK.

A special mention goes to the author of the Lady Franklin paper, Alexa Price, for managing to bring the Princess Bride into her talk (in context).

There were a bit too many old guard duffers and rather a shortage of fluent men, apart from Neil Dicken, who also, in his talk on GNSS, referenced Tristan and his natural navigation techniques (in the context of urban navigation without GPS).

Thanks to the National Maritime Museum for organising it and I will keep an eye out for future conferences they arrange.

London Boat Show: Navigation Tips with Stokey Woodall

My chat with Conrad Humphreys touched on navigation techniques but later there was to be a whole talk about it from Pete "Stokey" Woodall (above).

I'd seen him at a previous London Boat Show when he'd described the star clock (below) for which the answer was not 42 but 41.5. I'd even gone off and done a bit of maths to work out that it was really 41.58 which I guess is close enough.

It was a very entertaining talk, including such gems as rolling up a chart into a cone and using it to locate fog-horn directions to within a few degrees (apparently that really works). Also a metal frying pan can be used to shield an AM radio so that the direction of the transmitter can be identified from the two possible directions 180 degrees apart.

There was also some more celestial navigation tips based upon one of the stars in Orion, Mintaka, that rises or sets due East / West:

Fun and informative!

Art of Fiji at the Sainsbury Centre

All sailors must be impressed by the skills of the people of Micronesia,  Melanesia and Polynesia in crossing the vast Pacific. They combined expertise in boat building with navigation to cross literally thousands of miles of open water. The Marshall Islands chart was one of my highlights of the recent British Library map exhibition.

So I was intrigued to hear of an exhibition of "Fiji: Art & Life in the Pacific" and, grabbing a book to read on the train, headed up to Norwich and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts.

Alas most of the exhibition was a no-photography zone apart from the two items at ground level, in particular the boat above and the matting below:

The exhibition notes said this about the boat:

A highlight is a beautiful, specially commissioned, eight metre-long double-hulled sailing canoe that has been built in Fiji and shipped to Norwich for display. Made entirely of wood and coir cord, with no metal components, the canoe results from a project to encourage canoe-building skills and is a small version of the great 30-metre-long vessels of the 19th century, the biggest canoes ever built.

You can see more of the exhibition in the video they produced by clicking here (they have switched off embedding). When I went there was no dancing, and I also missed the Queen who dropped in to have a look, arriving by helicopter from nearby Sandringham according to my taxi driver.

There was also a video that showed these outrigger sailing canoes racing in Suva harbour which was fascinating as they can sail in either direction so tacking / gybing involve moving the sail physically from one end of the boat to the other while the steering oar goes vice versa.

Very interesting and rather at treat to see all this art together given how away Fiji is from the UK.

Drawing the line: Maps and the 20th Century at the British Library

I love maps and quirky events so the combination of British Library Late and their exhibition on Maps and the 20th Century was a where-do-I-buy-a-ticket combination.

I'd been to a previous Late at the Library event which had involved a performance of the theremin and return of a top 1,000 album, namely 76:14 by Global Communications which had been fab and weird and this was a bit more sober, though that might be because I didn't partake in the bar.

The exhibition had all sorts of 20th maps including politics, military, commerce and entertainment, starting with one of those wonderful / awful (delete as appropriate) maps of the British Empire with acres of red paint as produced by the Navy League in 1901.

Here a trio decided to stand directly in front of it and have a long discussion about their family while those interested in maps had to peer around them. Ah well, free country and all that.

Some of the maps were rather chilling. I saw a photo from the air of London in the 1940s in which could spot Battersea Park and Power Station, but it was created to guide German bombers during the Blitz.

At least we can move on from that: other maps are still extremely topical, such as that showing the infamous Sykes Picot Agreement.

One of my favourites was the Marshall Islands Stick Chart (above) which Tristan no doubt knows all about. Another that caught my eye was this map and horizon drawing around the Bank of England:

After a bit the eyes did glaze when faced with a series of maps of 5 year plans and oil refineries and so it was time to leave and head out into the Late events.

This included a couple of virtual reality installations including one of London (they judged the interests of their audience well) and another of what it would be like to be in the land of Revelations. Artists could be seen drawing maps freehand and selling those created earlier and a DJ mixed tracks that echoed around the atrium:

There were also opportunities to contribute to a user generated map where the Thames was given but all the rest was up to us:

I added a pub: I think Buff would have approved.

On until the 1st of March so go now if you're interested.

London Rivers Week

As a distraction from the insanity and self destruction currently on display in the politics of the Dis-United Kingdom (D-UK), here is a lovely mash-up showing London's waterways in the form of a tube map.

It's from Thames 21 as part of London Rivers Week.

Just look at those lovely names: Priests Bridge, Bell Lane Creek, Wilderness Island, Little Venice, Trinity Buoy - and those more mundane, such as Footpath No.19, M4 Bridge and Kelvin Industrial Estate.


Updated: I was trying to get a better graphic when found it comes from the Soundmap of London web site here. There's an interactive map where you can hear sounds from each place!

Dangerous Navigation on the Thames

Obviously all of you observe the navigation rules when out on the water, all of the time.

But it appears there are some that sometimes don't, such as these two stories of RIBs on the Thames which were recently fined for dangerous navigation:

• One was found "navigating on the wrong side of the river near Canary Wharf and caused another vessel to take avoiding action"
• Another was coming "round a bend near North Greenwich Pier and collided with a cabin cruiser which had two people on board"

I'm pretty sure the police (or maybe PLA) response and language wasn't as graphic as in the image above (actually from the Boat Race, go Kevin!), but hopefully the message was clear.

Lets be safe out there.

Book Review: How to Read Water by Tristan Gooley

I can't remember not living close to water. I grew up by the little Nailbourne river, that flows and dries as the chalk hills fill and empty. I've sailed the Atlantic, learnt (and mostly forgotten) the sailing light codes and bathed in a natural hot spring in Greenland while watching icebergs glide by.

But I still learnt masses and masses from this brilliant book.

For anyone who has any connection with water - and that definitely includes all sailors and kayakers - this is a must-have book.

Learn how to navigate like a Polynesian in a pond, use the reflection of Jupiter to spot bats, discover the best beaches on the Scilly Isles, where to look for gold in a beach and much, much more - this book is packed with fascinating information.

Worth having on a boat for those "I wonder what?" moments or taken on a walk along the coastline to understand the topography of a beach, the differences between ripples, waves and swell, how to read sand ripples and avoid those deadly rip currents.

Sure to be a classic - strongly recommended.



Two other reviews here and here.

Full disclosure: Tristan is a good friend of mine and this book mentions events that happened while we were sailing together plus I got a review copy.

Natural Navigation Picture Puzzle

This photo was taken at noon on alongside one of the canals in east London.

Can you work out which?

All round green light

Spotted on Lake Geneva, an all round green light, as well as a white light, a port light and (not visible in this long exposure) a starboard light. Not how I remember the regs but maybe its a local thing.

The changing Thames - from below the surface

Nice video from the PLA on how they track how things are changing below the surface.

Next of course, how the Thames is changing - from above.

The danger of electronic charts

Electronic charts are great - I like them so much I must have bought Iceland about 3 times - for iPhone, iPad and iNavX.

But they have a gotcha that can get even the best navigators, as the Volvo Ocean Race's Team Vesta found out to their cost - see this post on SA via Noodle.

Take the patch of water above, which is just north of Iceland, viewed today using the Navionics Web App. Looks pretty clear doesn't it?  Contours at 200 m and 500 m, just great, clear sailing. One island called Grimsey near the coast but when sailing there in 2012 we were far away.

Only it isn't clear at all. Take that harmless sounding reference to Kobeinsey (which I've added a red circle around). It looks like a description of that patch of water but look what you see if you zoom in:

This is from the Navionics charts on the iPhone for the same region, zoomed into so you can see that Kolbeinsey is actually a small island, or maybe a large rock.

Ok, it might be just 7.5 metres or so across but that would have been enough for us to prang Goldeneye something nasty when we sailed there in 2012. Confession time: it wasn't me that spotted this but Tristan: good thing one of us was awake.

But it shouldn't be like this: charting software should always show land, even when zoomed out.

Until then, let's be careful out there.



Updated: very interesting article about the wrecking of Team Vesta by Yachting World's Elaine Bunting here.

The Ammassalik wooden maps

These beautiful carvings are the British Library's copies of the Ammassalik wooden maps, created by local Inuit navigators and represent in 3D the coastline of East Greenland.

The top one is represents islands and the bottom the coastline, and were collected by Danish explorer Gustav Holm in the 1880s. They are designed to be felt in the hand, rotated round, possibly in the dark, with each notch and curve representing not just coastlines but its appearance and rock formations. They also have the advantage that they float.

The coastline block represents the tract between Kangerdluarsikajik, east of Sermiligak, and Sieralik, north of Kangerdlugsuatsiak.

His report notes that the "mainland continues from one side of the wooden block to the other, while the islands are located on the accompanying block without regard to the distance between them in reference to the mainland. All places where there are old ruins of houses, and therefore good storage places, are marked on the wood map, which also shows the points where a kayak can be carried over the ground between two fjords when the sea ice blocks the headline outside."

One of the fjords it covers is Kangerdlugssuaq, where we had engine failure, but I must admit I didn't recognise it, except in its description as "a fjord of such length that a kayak can not even in a whole day row from the mouth to the head of the fjord and back again".

I'm hoping to one day go back to Greenland and have made a mental note to try to get my hands on one of these and ask for a more detailed description of these fascinating works of art that are also navigational tools.

Longitude & Steampunked at Greenwich

Greenwich is officially ground zero for longitude, and so tourists from all over the world come to queue for the chance to stand on that line (above).

But how does one calculate longitude where there aren't helpful metal lines screwed into the ground? That was a question that puzzled some of the top minds for years, and after far too many ships were wrecked parliament passed the Longitude Act in 1714.

To commemorate its 300th anniversary there is currently an exhibition on the subject of Ships, Clocks & Stars: The Quest for Longitude at the National Maritime Museum (NMM).

Some of the suggestions put forward were simply bonkers - and in one case cruel to the dogs that were thought could have been used as a communications medium. More sensibly, John Harrison developed with his famous H4 watch that could be compared against local time to calculate longitude to sufficient accuracy.

All of Harrison's watches are part of this display - a remarkable collection.

Up on the hill above the NMM sits the Royal Observatory where official time was marked by dropping the red Time Ball every day at 13:00 precisely:

Here there is another view on the story of longitude taking an alternative, steampunk, approach:

It is hugely entertaining.

For example take these great quadrants that were used in calculating angles, such as this one used by Halley (which is actually just outside the exhibition but I didn't take a picture of the one inside):

The caption inside the exhibition was as follows:

The Commodore, by the way, was the fictional character around which the Longitude Punk'd exhibition was built, in particular The Rime of the Ancient Commodore, which starts:

There was an ancient Commodore,

My Granddad told to me,

Who'd lived three hundred years before

And sailed a wond'rous sea,

With flocks (or herds) of Kiwi birds,

A wander was he

I found myself laughing out loud at this one, which was attached to a sad picture of a ship o' the line aground:

Both are worth visiting, one for being informative and the other entertaining.

Natural Navigation Picture Puzzle

This picture was taken looking directly across the river towards Fulham on Putney Embankment where downriver is SE.

Two questions:

1. What was the state of the tide?
2. What was the wind direction?

Book Review: Sextant by David Barrie

Sextant by David Barrie is the story of the navigational instrument of that name.

It tells the history of its development and some of the great voyages that were possible using its ability to accurately measure angles from a pitching and rolling deck.

The book is framed by the story of the author's first transatlantic sail as a teenager with a family friend, Colin, and his cousin (Colin's that is, not David's) Alexa, also a teenager.

It's well written and I found it interesting, even though it covered the same ground as other sailing history books I've read. It linked explorers and sailors such as Cook, Vancouver, Flinders, Fitzroy, Slocum, Bligh and Shackleton together via their navigational tools.

It even ends up with a pitch for natural navigation and a reference to Tristan's book.

The only unanswered question was what it had been like as a teenage boy to spend weeks in close proximity to a teenage girl, namely Alexa, in that first transatlantic crossing. Maybe its time to add Dove to my reading list.

Overall a recommended read about one of offshore sailing's key navigational tools.