Its a 37′ boat. One of the boats I sailed in was that size. An Express 37. The other was a Bristol Channel Cutter 28.

That boat isn’t much longer than my van. It’s probably lucky it has room for a compass. I don’t see evidence of radar, but I haven’t seen a picture of the whole mast (I assume the antenna would be up near the mast top somewhere).

An offshore sailer would carry a GPS, one with digital charts, and a cheap handheld as backup, and a depth finder. Wind speed and direction gear and a log (speed through the water gauge). Two good mag compasses, of course, and a VHF radio (line-of-sight only). If it planned to go across oceans, it would also probably have an SSB radio
(like a short-wave and maybe a satellite phone) and a display/plotter for weather maps. A radar would probably be aboard, (I wonder if it was down, or simply no one thought to look at it). On my trips, one of the boats had radar, and it is useful for missing obstructions and other ships, and fog navigation in crowded harbors. I would imagine race rules would require some kind of emergency locator beacon, like an EPIRB. It tells an earth satellite where you are and puts out a signal, but you have to turn it on and keep it afloat.

The GPS tracker mentioned in the article seems like a handy piece of equipment. It’s new to me, but I imagine anything that useful will soon be on all blue-water boats, if it isn’t already.

It must also be kept in mind Aegean was part of a race, and in that kind of competition other boats are nearby, but usually out of sight and out of touch with each other (to not give away their position). Still, they all monitor the emergency channel). You’re not really alone.

Before GPS, things like crab traps were placed in clusters miles across, and marked with flags and strobes. Once you found one, you could find the others easily. Today, with GPS and 5 meter accuracy, you can put them anywhere you like.

The most dangerous hazards to blue water yachts are getting run over by merchantmen (they are notorious for putting on the autopilot and leaving the bridge unmanned to avoid paying their crews overtime); and running into shipping containers that have washed overboard from container ships). The damned things float flush with the water surface and are impossible to see, even in broad daylight. They can sink a yacht in seconds.

Solo sailors have to sleep sometime, so they usually engage the self-steering gear. But often, even with several crew on board, no one is on lookout. In rough weather they may heave-to and go below to rest, a maneuver in which the boat rides the waves safely with its sails balanced against its rudder, (or ride to a sea-anchor), but doesn’t actually go anywhere. And of course, in a fog, they are vulnerable to collision.

On a yacht, there are two types of self-steering. One is an electric autopilot, you set it on a certain compass course and it will point the ship in that direction, but if the wind changes the sails could go aback, so it is of limited usefulness. Mostly it is set temporarily while you go below for a dump, to do some chartwork, or to make a sandwich.

Wind vanes are strictly mechanical devices that sense the wind with a vane, and use the force on a small second rudder to turn the main rudder if the ship wanders off the wind. It is an elaborate device with chains, pulleys and gears, and it steers relative to the wind rather than a compass. If the wind changes direction, the self-steerer will alter course to follow it, sending you off into Jacundaville while you sleep below.

As you can imagine, most sailboats carry neither.

Found one for sale here, and that’s an impressive list of electronics. I doubt any sailing yacht has a quarter of this stuff.

I, too, have a hard time believing someone could run a boat near land and at least not be looking out for other boats or things just floating in the water.

I watch that show about crab fishermen. They don’t go into detail about their nav systems, but just from the displays they seem to be extremely elaborate. Other boats show up on it, along with all kinds of information including land, depths, bottom configurations, and where their crab pots have been dropped. I’d love to know how they managed the trick of relocating their pots before this kind of navigation was available. That’s like 500 foot accuracy.

There always seems to be someone manning the pilot’s seat on that show, although the captain does get down and go on deck while the boat is underway, implying at least a simple autopilot. I’m assuming he isn’t letting the cameraman drive.

I’ve sailed similar cruises twice, Catalina Island to Santa Cruz, and San Francisco to San Diego. We used electronics on both trips, Loran going N, GPS going S. In each case we used the electronics to get our position, laid out a course to our destination, checked carefully it was fair, and took frequent fixes with the electronics, complemented by visual sightings on lighthouses, landmarks, and the Channel islands to verify our GPS navigation. Of course, in those primitive days, (early 90s) all we got off our electronic gear was a lat/lon, no fancy digital charts. We did all our chart work on paper charts, with pencil and simple drafting tools. That sort of forces you to stay alert and aware of your surroundings.

At all times, we had situational awareness, we knew where we were, where away and how far the nearest land was, potential hazards, nearby aids to navigation, harbors, and once, when some foul weather hit us, we even had a secluded cove with good anchoring ground picked out ahead of time to duck into, with a cape that offered some shelter from a NW blow.

I remember taking tangent bearings off the Channel Islands and, visual bearings off Morro Bay, Anacapa Light, even Hearst Castle and the gantries at Vandenberg. They’re all marked on the chart. The electronics were a great thing to have, but they were not essential, we saw them as a convenience, and we always kept a parallel plot running on the chart with our estimated, or dead reckoning position. This also allowed us to verify our mag compass was working right. Even if we lost everything due to weather or malfunction, we always had a solid posit less than a few hours old we could base reasonable estimates on for a few days if need be.

With electronics you get lazy, you tell it where you’re going and it knows where you are, so at any time you can press a button and it will tell you you have ’200 miles and three days to go on this course’. So you let slide all that other stuff and forget to look at the chart, or scan the horizon, or keep a man on deck with binoculars. You lose track of where you are. and at night you set the self-steering gear and go below and smoke a joint.

I bet that’s pretty much what happened to that Italian skipper in the Med, too.

The Wikipedia article on these islands says they’re often used by smugglers. I wonder if any foul play was involved.