Very impressive, but I’ve still raced sailing boats without the need for a compass. I could even work out whether the line is biased without one, given it indicates the earth’s magnetic field rather than the wind direction (and despite the low level of my races, I was always competitive enough to bother working it out). I think you’re making the mistake of thinking that all sail racing is the sort you’ve been involved with (hint: I’ve not done a race where the windward mark is 1nm away). Strangely you even mention the sort of racing where you don’t need one…

In case you need reminding, this was your original quote:

Yes, it’s a basic need for any sail racing or cruising.

Darrell, I reckon none of these big girls blouses could take a dip and strike.

Geology=compass use 7th Dan.

We’re talking about the direction of contour lines and a line perpendicular to that, right? 😉

No. Bedding planes, jointing and faulting. To make a 3D model of structures and artifice.

😉

Hmm, but Google is telling me strike is a contour line!

Oh. GOOGLE. In that case I concede.

Yes. Damn handy skill to have.

Strike is contour line of the rock structure feature, such as bedding plane, which may or may not have anything to do with the contour of the ground profile.

Yep, geology tends to hone compass skills (PhD spent mapping stratigraphy and structures and producing maps of the Atlas mountains), as does cave surveying (miles of new passages surveyed and mapped in the Austrian & German Alps). More recently you might imagine that the past 3 years of orienteering almost every other weekend would have further perfected my compass skills, but to be honest I can now think my way through a landscape. I can’t remember the last time I had to take a bearing other than teaching others how to use a compass.

Not blowing my own trumpet, but navigation is probably my strongest life skill by a long shot. 🙂

Ive used a compass and know how to take bearings etc but figuring out the magnetic deviation always gets me, mainly cos I suck at maths. I do remember mag to grid get rid, grid to mag add.

I’d need to go and practice a bit but navigating to a point on a specific contour line in Scottish white-out used to be my forte.

I suspect it will take a while to get that level of accuracy back.

ive not raced dinghies seriously since the late 70s but on a proper sized Olympic triangle I found a compass to be very useful. That was nothing to do with using a compass for location though, it just let you know your heading towards the windward mark.
Other boats and weather were always equally important factors.

Well you don’t ever really take a bearing as such when orienteering – though compass skills are very useful when navigating the fastest way through a forest without significant features on the map. As mentioned, my orienteering compass doesn’t have a rotating bezel – or indeed any numbers – so I couldn’t “take a bearing” if I wanted to.

Thankfully in this country it doesn’t matter a huge amount – it’s always been quite small, but at the moment it’s small enough to be effectively negligible for anything where you don’t need absolute precision. TBH even when triangulating with back bearings your measurement errors are likely to be a lot bigger than the difference magnetic deviation makes. Personally I decided not to bother about it for the rough navigation which is what I normally use a compass for (when not orienteering, in which case you don’t have to worry at all as North lines are magnetic).

Yes since I was a young kid in the Cubs & Scouts and I learned how to spot north from the stars and make a makeshift compass by magnetising a pin and floating it in a rock pool and moss on the north side of trees and by using a watch aligning it with the sun, I wonder if they even teach this stuff in the Scouts these days, I know they don’t get to have sheath knives, and hand axes on their belts,do they get to fight with staves, or play british bulldog I wonder.
Do they teach kids anything useful even, it doesn’t surprise me none of your office colleagues can read a map, or follow a compass bearing.

I bet they don’t even teach them how to use a slide rule or a fountain pen.

Yes – but a bit rusty, heard we don’t need worry about Magnetic north, true north, grid north or what ever it was any more!

Yup. Also a bit of resection and intersection location finding, that’s also a handy skill to have in your back pocket.

Absolutely no idea. I really should learn because I have no sense of direction.

I once got lost going from one side of Clapham Common to the other. I somehow wound up in Westminister.

Except it’s not…. it’s a pretty basic life skill.
Is it? Really?

Swimming. First Aid. Yes.

Using a compass? Nah.

relating this thread to my days at sea
– I know a lot of seafarers who can’t/couldn’t swim. Life skills you say?
– a good bunch of deck officers couldn’t use a sextant. I remember the whole kerfuffle with Y2K and every Captain from Shanghai to Caracas insisted we practice taking sights and noon positions. Comedic times whilst we all dusted off the sextants and tried to remember how to take a sight.

Frankly life skills should be more of the interpersonal relationship/communication/problem solving/critical thinking etc

Life Saving Skills on the other hand……

Yep, on land and at sea (Yachtmaster)

When racing anything from dinghies to big boats, always used a compass for checking start line line bias and wind shifts, particularly on beats…even around the cans.

Yes, apart from the fact that I’ve lost it. It was a ‘sighting’ compass – a fact that was totally lost on Mrs B, who was baffled by my mirth when she asked to borrow (and I quote) “your mirror, you know, the one with the compass built in”.

I can use a compass no problem, was quite surprised to find people on my MIAS course who struggled with it.

What I can’t do, and was rather impressed by was navigate effectively by the stars. On Salisbury plain one night, trudging along in the darkness on our way to defeat the evil greenlandians or whatever our enemy was being called that day, and the mist was so thick you couldn’t see anything at ground level.

We pause for a nav check and speculate on how we will find anything in this. Our young and inexperienced platoon commander announces we will navigate by the stars, to much derision from the rest of the unit. Undeterred he peered at the stars using some sort of wizardry, decided where we were, pointed us in a random direction and announced that in 200m we should meet a fence line that will lead us to the objective. Pacing it out, 200m we meet the fence line and find the objective, magic.

Long story short, we bought him a GPS for when he went off to sandhurst

Hmm – I’m betting he already had one. About all you can deduce from the stars without instruments is direction, and presumably you had a compass for that? Even with instruments I don’t think you could get even 200m accuracy without the use of a tripod and quite a lot of calculations. Your platoon commander had some other information and was conning you.

That’s a temporary thing and depends where you are. The magnetic pole wanders about a bit and Magnetic North is currently pretty close to Grid North for many areas in the UK. It just depends how accurate you want/need to be.

yes although I suspect I’d be a bit rusty now. I’ve actually flown a competition gliding task on a hand held Silva compass and a map including navigating around airspace (think maps * 3D * moving at 100mph while working it out) without any issues other than I was a bit slower than i could have been as my electronics went down when the instrument overheated prior to launch.

Certainly it’s a dying art though

Yes, can even use a compass clinometer

Helped out with the cub scouts one evening this week on a walk through the local woods. One of them (8 years old) pointed to an animal in a nearby field and asked “What on earth is that?”. It was a cow 😯

Can you use a compass?

Yep, Taught myself as a kid out of one of those boys own adventure books that were popular in the 70’s/80s, knowing how to use a compass goes hand in hand with knowing how to read the terrain though, whether that be on a map or under foot. I’ve met more than my fair share of righteous numptys with a compass whilst out in the Galloway hills (pretty much everywhere is a tussocky energy sucking bog) and i’ve tried to advise them on suitable routes but they obviously know better as the compass is never wrong. Very similar to those car drivers that rely on sat navs and drive off piers or into rivers. 😀

Yes
And read charts and use all those cool nautical navigation tools like plotters and dividers. Maps and charts are skills I love having but can see why not everyone has.

I bumped into a group of school girls on what I assume was a practice DoE on Pitch Hill on Saturday evening. They were hopelessly lost. They had a laminated extract of an OS map and a couple of them had compasses. I helped them with where they were and where they had to go. Then I asked about a compass and I asked why they weren’t using it. Oh they didn’t teach us how to use it!! Seriously!? I know that the Surrey Hills are not exactly the last great wilderness but even so. So, Cheam High School – you should be embarrassed!

I’ll add a yes along with micronavigation, pacing, counting stuff and if needed get there by the sun.

^ at least IME volunteering on DoE expeditions, the instructors shouldn’t have been far away. On the bronze practices, we’d shadow them as they’d often just yomp off in a random direction.

DofE bronze use of compass is more about putting the map to ground to honest. Maybe a little of using a compass and a bearing to work out which of two paths to take at a junction etc but not a lot more. I do seem to remember of a bit of pacing was covered. I never really used the bit of paper as I found the whole paperwork side of the DofE (in Hampshire) such a ball ache I fell out of love with the concept of the award. When I did the trainer/assessor course I was quite surprised how basic the expected level was and also how little most of the others doing the course knew.