SeaHorse II wrote:
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Marin wrote:We experience no such weirdness on the GPS in the car or on the map displays when I get to fly one of our simulators around at work.
Why would the using the same orientation on a boat be any different?
If your going south from San Diego to Cabo, don't you think it's a little weird to see the land mass on the right of your plotter screen?
"Weirdness" as I used it is relative to how we feel, not that I think it's weird whoever does it this way.
There's nothing weird in my opinion about the notion of running with the plotters in course or heading up.* We just prefer a north up orientation.* As I said, neither my wife nor I have any problems visualizing where our boat is relative to what's around us even if we are running the opposite direction.* For whatever reason, we don't need the orientation of what we see outside the window to match the orientation of the chart or the plotter display.* We "match" the orientation in our minds, I guess.* Whatever, neither one of has a problem matching the navaids, shoreline configurations, etc we see out the windows to the charts regardless of how the charts are oriented to the view out the window.* But if someone held a gun to our heads and said from now on you can only run your plotters in course-up, fine, no problem.
When we first started flying the Beaver up the Inside Passage into BC and SE Alaska I cut up a bunch of sectional charts into 11" x 14" rectangles with our course more or less up the middle and glued them to 11" x 14" pieces of heavy cardboard.* This was because we didn't want to be wrestling with folding and refolding a set of large sectionals as we progressed up the coast.* So I put the first "board" in my lap and when we reach the top of it I put it away and get the second board and keep going.* It takes eight of our "boards" to go from Seattle to Petersburg.
Going up the coast the charts on the boards are oriented more or less to what we see out the windscreen.* But when we fly home at the end of the trip, we don't turn the boards around.* We hold them the same way.* Partly because, unlike a plotter, when you turn a chart upside down all the text and numbers are upside down, too.* So working with north-up is just something we've gotten used to over many, many years.
So yes, if we were to run a boat down the west coast of Baja we'd have the plotters set to north up with the land on the right and the Pacific on the left.* And we would keep the paper chart at the helm oriented the same way.* And I don't think we would even consciously notice that the orientation was different to what we saw out the window unless someone asked us why we were doing it that way
So as I said, it's all just personal preference.* There is no right or wrong way to do it.