NASTY SANDY CHURNING UP THE COAST

@Setanta,

Interesting anecdotes.

Your'e right about latitude measurments using Polaris. This star is easily located, and, because it is so close to the extended North Pole, even the crude devices you noted for determining elevsation (= Latitude ) were usually good enough.

An interesting related matter for the early oceanic seafarers was that the prevailing Atlantic currents were cyclonic with definate easterly & westerly currents at known latitudes. The early Norse and Irish seamen & explorers knew about these currrents and used crude measures of Polaris' elevation to find them and simply kept the star on their beam until they made a landfall - no real need to know Longitude. Later the Portuguese and Spanish learned and used similar techniques, tho it was a bit harder in the Southern Hemisphere without an obvious polar star like Polaris.

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@georgeob1,

Maybe, you guys might have the answers. Some years ago, I had the opportunity to visit the island of Fiji. The inhabitants of that island are blacks from Africa, but nobody seems to know how they reached that far island, because blacks were not known to be navigators of the seas.

Any guesses?

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@georgeob1,

actually, had you not been sleeping in surveying classes, you would have recalled that Polaris IS NOT the star that is used alone. It is the columation of Polaris, delta, and Mizar. Columation is necessary or we could be off a vrying amount of arc.

I always loved to set students off to columate (cause it meant that theyd have to set up stations during the night)

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@cicerone imposter,

The Melanesians are the group you are speaking of, (The group is the Papuan populations composed of about 45 separate sub groups). All of these populations originated in New Guinea and were the result of the second circum pacific migration of hominims.
The papuan group of sub populations migrated from New Guinea through the Solomons and then on to Fiji as one colonization spot about 30K ybp. They are the "original" people and the Polynesian (austrlonesian) are the latest at about 6Kbp and are genetically unrelated

These people were only recently tracked in their migration routes (2005) by tracking a lethal gene protein called the ABNORMAL-SPINDLE_LIKE MICROENCEPHALY ASSOCIATED PROTEIN (in short, the ASPM protein or the ASP-homolog)

This lethal gene protein occurs as its referred shape in as much as 45% of the present population and MAY be a sign of what was originally termed the "Human bottleneck" due to the Toba super volcano which reduced the population of the "originals" to as few as 40 people in the breeding cluster.
In that respect they're sorta like the AMISH in the presence and percent occurences of lethal genetic conditions.
Thats why the argument about Homo Florensis says that it coulda been a microencephalic and not a real species.

look up the ASPM and Fijians relationship. You may get a map of the tracings of migration by this genetic marker

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@farmerman,

farmerman wrote:

actually, had you not been sleeping in surveying classes, you would have recalled that Polaris IS NOT the star that is used alone. It is the columation of Polaris, delta, and Mizar. Columation is necessary or we could be off a vrying amount of arc.

I always loved to set students off to columate (cause it meant that theyd have to set up stations during the night)

The accuracy required for surveying is, as you know, far greater than for navigation. For shipboard navigation a one mile uncertainty in a celestial fix is both the norm and sufficient for the purpose. For aircraft it's more like ten miles (the big problem being the usual lack of a horizon reference).

However, it was bemusing to note ther widespread cartography errors that became evident with the combination of GPS and satellite photography. Numerous errors in the location of manmade objects and even natural features of up to 1/2 mile on standard charts energed and were corrected. Even the early inertial navigation ststems (of the late 1970s) suggested cartographical errors of that magnitude, but their evidence was (probably rightly) not considered conclusive. There are many possible sources for such cartographic errors, and it may not be the fault of the surveyors - the earth isn't perfectly spherical.

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@georgeob1,

I guess you never sailed that thing in high latitudes. (I hear that aircraf carriers are quite inefficient in the circumpolar regions)
A celestial nav error of a degree or more is possible starting at high latitudes where everything is south.

I get a kick out of how weird Greenland still is on many maps (Including National Geographic atlases)

You guys really dont teach celestial navigation anymore do you?

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@farmerman,

farmerman wrote:

I guess you never sailed that thing in high latitudes. (I hear that aircraf carriers are quite inefficient in the circumpolar regions)
A celestial nav error of a degree or more is possible starting at high latitudes where everything is south.

I get a kick out of how weird Greenland still is on many maps (Including National Geographic atlases)

You guys really dont teach celestial navigation anymore do you?

Well I did have the experience of taking an aircraft carrier across the Bearing Sea in February from the west coast of the US to just off the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia. Our route took us North through the Aleutians to a latitude just north of the Pribilof islands (latitude about 59 deg north).We launched aircraft every day and operated in complete electronic silence (except UHF radio), to evade the Soviet electronic detection satellites; and used the known orbital tracks of their narrower sweepwidth radar satellites to evade detection by them. ( We also had some decoy ships sailing well South of the Aleutions with "misic boxes" = portable electronic transmitters that mimic the signature of a carrier battle group). The operations were indeed challenging. We figured out how to deice a steel flight deck using the deflected jet exhaust of A-6 and A-7 aircraft, and struggled to cope with the Arctic ice fog.

Some years earlier I operated on carriers in the North Atlantic and the Norwegan sea at latitudes up to about 65 deg North (just above Iceland), and earlier in a detachment of aircraft operation out of the northern NATO airfields in Norway (Bodo & Andoya) up at Latitude 70 deg North. We used to fly out to Jan Mayen and Spitzbergen islands just for kicks. The wierd part is that in winter up there, it never gets completely dark: the sun (with a -26 deg declination) merely swings around the horizon during the course of a day, and that can be a bit disorienting. As you know magnetic compasses aren't of much use up there and neither are Mercatur projection charts (the source of Greenland's odd shapes on them). We used gyrocompasses and gnomic charts. Today it's all GPS, but I suspect that, even with that, the coverage gets a bit thin very near the poles.

It did give me a lot of respect for the U-2 pilots who, years earlier were flying from Incerlick in Turkey across the USSR and up to Bodo with even simpler navigation gear than we had.

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@georgeob1,

neat!. You sound like youve had a really dull life so far .

Id kill to ride a jet in those latitudes at night.

In Maine we call that Frid fog, "Sea smoke" . You can pilot a boat with a tuna fly bridge no swet , but you have to get about 20ft up off the deck

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@farmerman,

farmerman wrote:

Id kill to ride a jet in those latitudes at night.

I'd agree, but only on a clear night ! As you know the dust free, and relatively low humidity, air of the North is very clear. Just the starlight over the open sea can provide an horizon clear enough to fly by. The view of the heavens is even more spectacular than what one sees in a desert. Moreover, at those latitudes the star map was, at least to me, magical and unfamiliar, with Polaris at a 70+ degree elevation.

Quote:

Maine we call that Frid fog, "Sea smoke" . You can pilot a boat with a tuna fly bridge no swet , but you have to get about 20ft up off the deck

We ran into some of that stuff that went up more than 400 ft above the water. Moreover it was thick enough that I could barely see the flight deck from the bridge. I believe the physics of the two are similar, and it forms rather suddenly. At one point I got caught in the stuff with about 25 aircraft airborne. We were then about 800NM northeast of Shemya island - the nearest friendly airfield, so diverting the aircraft was not a safe option. I launched some tankers (which gave me another 20 minutes or so each - plus two more aircraft to recover) and, after some brief but very intense deliberation, headed South for the nearest island at max speed, hoping that, in the southwesterly winds I might encounter some wake turbulence from the volcanoes there, which with the ship's induced turbulence at 35Kts might clear the air enough for the pilots to land. It was a strange feeling going at that speed through the impenetrable fog with no radar, but after a couple of hours we got into some patchy clear spots that were enough for us to get the aircraft aboard. Towards the end we got some much needed help too from an Air Force Tanker launched from Eileson AFB in Alaska.

It was a long day.

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@georgeob1,

jeez. Maybe Ill do a rainchek on that jet ride.

QUESTION: why did you launch the plans in the first place? was it a normal deployment of planes or were you reacting to something? If you cant say, Ill surmise from that.

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@farmerman,

farmerman wrote:

jeez. Maybe Ill do a rainchek on that jet ride.

QUESTION: why did you launch the plans in the first place? was it a normal deployment of planes or were you reacting to something? If you cant say, Ill surmise from that.

Well, as is true of many such things ... It seemed like a good idea at the time.

We were in a very clear area at the launch, and I had previously figured out the value of launching an S-3 (multi engine, pilot & copilot)aircraft (which had very long range and endurance) as a weather scout (no polar area weather satelite coverage in those days). I had insisted that we (1) launch the scout and get an initial report back from him before we (2) launched the rest of the aircraft; tho this two step procedure was regaurded as a bit of excessive caution by the Air Boss & Air Wing Commander (That didn't surprise me, in that I had already long since learned the truth of the maxim that no one who isn't accountable for something really worries about it.) That morning I got in a few hours of overdue sleep and had my XO oversee the morning launch. The flight deck had gotten a little scrambled with the assigned scout aircraft locked in behind others, and the Air Boss talked the XO into launching a few aircraft to clear the deck to free the scout. Unfortunately that broke the ordered sequence and they stupidly went on launching the rest of the aircraft immediately after launching the scout. As luck would have it, the scout developed a serious hydraulic leak and had to be recovered. Minutes later the fog devaloped around us. At that point a very nervous XO called to wake me up .....

No point in expressing my feelings at that point (apart from a few Goddamns ) as I needed everyone focused on fixing the situation. However later the Air Boss, XO and I had a long talk about their folly, and both got the chance to read about it later.

Most of the time it wasn't nearly that exciting.

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@georgeob1,

Quote:

(That didn't surprise me, in that I had already long learned the truth of the maxim that no one who isn't accountable for something really worries about it.)

HAAAAA. I used to say about the Calif Water Bord that they"HAd infinite input but no responsibility" so they could be very astute sounding assholes while we hadda spend client money on their whimsies.
Sorry, aside

Quote:

and both got the chance to read about it later

I take it that it wasnt very lauditory? Woulda been your entire career had something bad happened eh?

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@farmerman,

I share your feelings about the various California water boards. You said it well, "infinite opinions, but no responsibility". I think I'll use that.

The real concern was losing 25 or so pilots and aircraft. Feelings that intessified as I watched the pilots of the tankers I launched into the dense fog, knowing full well they might not get back either. One looked me in the eye as he taxied up to the catapault - he knew.

I doin't think any career concerns bothered me that day. Every day at sea offored some opportunity in that area, but that was part of the deal. The Navy had a lot of rules, but in fact valued good outcomes above all else. The rules were merely the formalism through which they got rid of people who delivered bad outcomes. It was a good system.

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@georgeob1,

Ca water board and Ohio EPA are two of the most challenging reg agencies to deal with in my experience.
I always note the number of people who show up at a meeting, provide me with cards, take notes , and then disappear from any part of a project. Their "Inputs" are often turned into "requirements" for our client. MEans more work for us but at what sense?

Ive given up my Calif license in the late 90's I dont miss it.

I was alays surprised at how many guys can get "benched" from a career when they dont produce superior outcomes in the NAvy Chain of Command. Especially driving a ship

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@georgeob1,

georgeob1 wrote:

The Navy had a lot of rules, but in fact valued good outcomes above all else. The rules were merely the formalism through which they got rid of people who delivered bad outcomes. It was a good system.

Mmmm ... but make that "Every Navy had a lot of rules ..."

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@Walter Hinteler,

In The World Crisis, Churchill notes that the rules change dramatically when war breaks out. Specifically, he was referring to the escape of SMS Goeben and SMS Breslau, but later also referred to the timidity of the Royal Navy and the French Navy in the Sea of Marmara.

Before war breaks out, the worst thing you can do for your career is to damage your ship--slam into a quay or lay it on some rocks during a storm. But as soon as war breaks out, you have to go in harm's way. Admittedly, with the Sea of Marmara, he was employing 20-20 hindsight, and there was some sour grapes as the whole campaign was his idea. But he was right, basically. When ships go to war, some of them get damaged, and some get sunk. That's how the game is played--i agree with him that the RN and the French should have gone right back in until either the Turkish forts were reduced, or they no longer could put a credible flotilla up against them. As we do know with hindsight, the Turks were on the verge of collapse at that point.

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@Setanta,

My response was more related to ... well, the actual,practical situation: years ago, it happened quite often that the commanding officer of ship acted a bit outside the regulated rules of the handbook. If all went well and no-one complained, he got his next medal/ribbon* and the ship/boat a special article in the Navy Times. If not ....

* like these:

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@farmerman,

farmerman wrote:

I was alays surprised at how many guys can get "benched" from a career when they dont produce superior outcomes in the NAvy Chain of Command. Especially driving a ship

That's true. It happens to about 1 in 4 carrier COs. Career mortality among carrier pilots was about 1 in 10 in peacetime when I started. However guys that age don't think they're going to die ever.

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@Setanta,

Quote:

That's how the game is played--i agree with him that the RN and the French should have gone right back in until either the Turkish forts were reduced, or they no longer could put a credible flotilla up against them. As we do know with hindsight, the Turks were on the verge of collapse at that point

.

You needed troops along with those ships to had seized and hold those forts and the very slow moving minesweepers was just good target practice for the forts.

Without the narrow waters being sweep of mines you would just had been throwing away capital ships for zero gain.

Churchill happen to had been wrong in this case.

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NASTY SANDY CHURNING UP THE COAST

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