I found this book in a second-hand bookshop. Despite its publishing date of 1937 (second revised edition), it is full of sage advice and advertisements for 'must have' gadgets including the Hamble Line Passer - still a useful tool for hitching a line to a stable object from a distance. The author W. Eric Wilson, D.S.O with assistance from Admiralty Chart Agent J.D. Potter based in the Minories in London and their neighbours Imray, Laurie, Norie & Wilson Ltd., the oldest Nautical Publishers in the world (or so they claimed) who published this hefty tome in their printing works in Hackney, all conspired to produce this detailed guide for the serious sailor.
Guides, in all forms, are there to assist in times of trouble, need, or in expectation of either. A firm hand on the forearm, a gentle nudge in the desired direction from the 'you don't have to do this the hard way, allow me to enlighten you' folk who have gone before. We navigate our lives making good, bad, and indifferent choices. Guidance is always worth listening to, in navigational terms experienced guidance is essential. Like sea shanties and folk songs, handed down by word of mouth for centuries, changing with the times but doggedly true to its original form. The Pilot's Guide is a sensible practical tome on the vagaries of the English Channel, of necessity it must be trustworthy and reliable, lives depended on it.
W.E.W could surely not conceive of a modern-day Channel full of super-tankers and people in barely sea-worthy inflatables, and the seasonal influx of top-heavy gin-palaces, and I wonder if he, or J.D. Potter or Messrs Imray, Laurie, Norie & Wilson, gave thought or conversation to a time when printed maps would be digitised, along with instruments so that maps became less important and computer screens plotted courses and pinged against satellites to guide sailors around the English Channel.
There is a reason why sailors for the most part are easygoing. they've learnt to make and read signals, to predict the weather, how best to make an approach, judge depth, understand the tides, and perhaps most useful of all how to use a compass including variation and deviation, and having absorbed all that understood, practised and reflected on that wealth of seafaring knowledge, a good sailor might also digest that cautionary truth as expressed thus by W.E.W "Discretion must be duly exercised in the use of all Sailing Directions as aids to navigation, and they should not be regarded as infallible, as a little consideration will show. A chart or a book may be accurate at the time of publication, but it may become unreliable in some particulars owing to the changes in shoals and their constant and numerous alterations in Lights, Buoyage, etc." In effect, guidance is just that, the sum of someone else's experience but the world is not constant, it is ever changing. For the Pilot amongst us, it pays to be humble in plotting a course, to stay calm and prepared, and to meet the unexpected with the same assurance in which you meet all challenges, with a weather eye to the horizon and a quick arrival at the most practical solution.
