I learnt to race offshore when the only electronic aid was a Decca and wind speed and direction dials, oo yes, and a car radio to catch the Shipping Forecast and a VHF to call for help.
Me too .... and I remember how the Decca could only tell you your position if you told it an approximate position first, and could easily end up one or more "cells" out - resulting in it giving a position on top of the South Downs when the boat was clearly still afloat on the English channel. I also remember a significant dead patch somewhere between Lands End and Ireland, which added a certain excitement to trying to locate the Fastnet rock and sail round it!
We watched as other newer boats in the fleet slowly filled up with more and more electronics. We ended up with a GPS (I think Decca was being turned off) but remained otherwise unencumbered. Somehow sailing from A to B became more satisfying the less sophisticated our boat became in comparison.
My skipper reckoned that in the early days the "GPS and navigation computer equipped" boats just kept pointing in the direction the GPS told them to go for the destination and didn't bother to make the necessary tidal allowances, resulting in a direct (relative to land) cross channel route but an S-shaped track through the water. Whereas we old schoolers still did our tidal offset calculations and course plotting the traditional way, resulting in an S-shaped route relative to land but the shorter and therefore faster direct track through the water.
The first Decca I encountered was a box about 2' x 2' x 3', bolted to the chartroom bulkhead. Its read out was three dials, red, purple and green, that showed numbers. The charts all included numbered red, purple and green parabolas and all you had to do was use the numbered parabolas to fix your Decca position. (That vessel was a bit bigger than a racing yacht though.)
That Decca hole in the Irish Sea ? Yup. As far as we could make out it started a few miles North of Lands End and went all the way to the Rock. At just about the same time the Decca failed we managed to ship a wave with the cabin hatch open and the chart table got drenched, knocking our VHF out.
During the race the expectation was that you radioed your position once a day, so our shore teams were becoming increasingly anxious until the RORC team on the Rock reported our rounding. Fun times !
Agree with you on the straight line through the water thing too.
The other long lost joy was that of transcribing the forecast, drawing the weather map and then determining which way to go based upon your interpretation of the data and your prediction as to how it would pan out after that.
Now all they have to do is have Navtex churn out the map and the PC run 10,000 simulations to work out which is likely to be the best route. Where's the fun/skill in that ?
