Tell Tales
Classic Boat’s address:
Jubilee House, 2 Jubilee Place, London, SW3 3TQ
[email protected]Sailors from America, Australia, Britain and
France head the preliminary entry list for the
2018 Golden Globe solo round the world
race. The event commemorates the 50th
anniversary of Sir Robin Knox-Johnston’s
pioneering victory aboard Suhaili in the
Sunday Times Golden Globe Race of 1968/
that led to the Briton becoming
the first person to sail solo and
non-stop around the world.
The 24 men and one woman- Britain’s Susie Bundegaard
Goodall – have each paid an
initial Aus $3,000 (£1,400) entry
fee, though some names remain
confidential until sponsorship
announcements are made later
this year. Other entrants hail from
Austria, Brazil, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Palestine,
Russia and Switzerland.
In other developments concerning the
race, the Cornish port of Falmouth has been
confirmed as the start and finish point for the
race, just as it was for Knox-Johnston. The
National Maritime Museum will stage a major
exhibition in 2018 to mark the 50th
anniversary of the original Sunday Times
Golden Globe Race, playing host to the event.
Competing yachts will be based in Pendennis
Marina, and the race will be started using the
historic gun emplacement on Pendennis Point
overlooking Falmouth harbour.London's Little Ship Club will host a sponsor
and competitor conference on 15 December,
where race founder Don McIntyre will
introduce members of his race management
team and to set out the rules. The race will
start on 14 June, 2018 and is expected to take
about 300 days. See goldengloberace.com.GOLDEN GLOBE 2018
25 sign up to start race
Follow the Classic Boat team
on Twitter and FacebookNAVIGATION
Sextants back on the US Navy curriculum
The US Navy has reinstated compulsory celestial navigation
training for all its new recruits, teaching the use of the sextant
once again. The move is a reaction to rising concerns that
computers used to chart courses could be hacked
or malfunction.
“We went away from celestial navigation
because computers are great,” said Lt Cmdr
Ryan Rogers, deputy chairman of the naval
academy's Department of Seamanship and
Navigation. He told Maryland newspaper The
Capital Gazette: “The problem is there's no
backup. If you can use GPS, it's just so
much more accurate,” said Rogers. “But
we know there are cyber
vulnerabilities.”
Recruits to the academy in
Annapolis, Maryland, have this autumn
seen astro navigation on their curriculum
for the first time since it was dropped in
2006, and reinstated in 2011, but
only for navigators.
“Knowledge of celestial
navigation in the GPS eraprovides a solid backup form of navigation in the event GPS
becomes unreliable for whatever reason,“ said Captain Timothy
Tisch, of the United States Merchant Marine Academy – which has
never abandoned astro navigation. “It is also good professional
practice to use one navigational system to verify the
accuracy of another.“
The move will be seen by some sailors as justification
of their own position that the old ways are sometimes
the best – or at least the most reliable. It also reflects a
growing dissatisfaction with what some
see as an over-reliance on technology
that has been taking the skill and
enjoyment out of sailing for the past
two decades or so. Just two months
ago (CB329), David Barrie, author of Sextant,
wrote a feature for us on the history of the
sextant, in which his words “if you abandon
the traditional craft of navigation and rely
on electronic data... there will surely be a
price to pay“ now seem prophetic.
As we went to press, our reader
competition to win a Davis Mark
25 sextant was about to end.Left: Race founder Don McIntyre
Below: The route Bottom left:
Sole female entrant, Britain's
Susie Bundegaard Goodall