"Now," said our captain, coming on the poop after he had worked up his dead reckoning at noontime, "you see all those ships dead to leeward—well they ought to be to windward of us unless all the books on navigation are wrong. I have entered in my traverse-table the courses we were supposed to have made good under the old rule, and have thus proved its falsity. The fact is the ships that were turned out in the days when these nautical axioms were first propounded were built by the mile and cut off in lengths to suit. They had no shape to speak of below the water-line, and perhaps the rule applied to each alike. Times are different now, and leeway must be determined by the model of the ship."
The rule for reckoning leeway is as follows:
Wind on starboard side, allow leeway to the left.
Wind on port side, allow leeway to the right.
Vessel on starboard tack, allow leeway to the left.
Vessel on port tack, allow leeway to the right.
In this connection it might be well to urge the young mariner against keeping his boat all a-shiver and bucking against a head sea, and all the while sagging off bodily to leeward. It is better far to keep the wake right astern and keep way on the vessel—unless, of course, the weather is too violent.
The direction and rate of tides and currents have also to be allowed for when correcting a compass course. Thus in crossing Long Island Sound from Larchmont to Oyster Bay in thick weather, the magnetic course as given in the Government chart would have to be rectified and allowance made for the condition of the tide, whether ebb or flood, or your boat might never reach her destination.
There are no better charted coasts in the world than those bounded by the North Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The United States Navy has done and is doing magnificent hydrographic work. The charts issued by the Government are accurate, reliable, up-to-date and reasonable in price.
The top of a chart when spread out in front of you so that the reading part appears to you like the page of a book, and you can read it from left to right, is the North, the bottom is the South, the side on your right is the East, and the side on your left is the West. There are always compasses on a chart, either true or magnetic, by reference to which and with the aid of the parallel rulers the bearing of one point from another may easily be ascertained by the following method: