Newport Bermuda Race - 30 years of Gulf Stream studies

3:15 AM Fri 18 Jun 2010 GMT

'Rich Wilson' Vincent Curutchet / DPPI / Vend?e Globe &copy

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the marriage of two technological revolutions that brought the Newport Bermuda Race into the modern age. One was precise electronic navigation, the other a new approach to analyzing the Gulf Stream. In 1980 for the first time sailors were allowed to use Loran-C navigation throughout the race. Though not as precise as satellite navigation and GPS, which both came later, Loran was much more accurate than celestial navigation. If you wanted to know where you were, and if you needed to get somewhere precisely, the cutting-edge tool was Loran. One of the first ...

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by John Rousmaniere