Aleria's Adventures

Just as we thought it would be safer out there with AIS, picking up ships long before they were a threat on the high seas, a new type of go-fast boat has come on the scene. Dubbed narco-submarines, they are being used for drug smuggling from Colombia, Guatemala and Panama to Mexico. One was recently intercepted off the coast of Galicia, Spain - not sure where they came from. The trouble with these boats is that they are not visible on AIS or radar, hard to spot with the naked eye, and even resistant to detection by infrared. That's a problem for people transiting the same waters in sailboats. Granted there aren't that many of them out there, but...

Visibility decreasing as we enter the Bay of Biscay  Not long ago, when people set sail to cross oceans, they set off with some charts, a sextant, sight reduction tables, pencils, dividers, parallel rules, a compass, a log to measure knots and a clock. If they knew the speed at which they were sailing, and how long they had sailed, they could determine where they were. They would back that up by taking sights on the stars and the sun and calculating their lat and long.