You ever get twisted around?

Course you youngsters with all your onboard digitalis won't grasp the concept, so this may just apply to the old geezers who know what DR means.

Spatial disorientation; flyers and divers know it but the average boater will not understand it until it bites them.

I've experienced it twice. First time, I missed the very narrow opening to a basin (Hidden Basin) and ran into Cockburn Bay right next door. Even going in I knew something was way wrong but kept going. Lucky, because both have obstructions right smack in the middle of the narrowest part of the entrance. Even inside, took time to sink in what I'd done. Other time was on Lake Powell. Easy to get spun out of whack there.

Another time, I escorted a new boat owner from Everett WA to Vancouver. He had next to no experience and no clue how to get home. I was ahead and part way up Saratoga Passage when he radioed he had to go below for a minute and that he would catch up. I watched as a few minutes later he fired up and tore off; away from me. I knew what had happened. He was almost out of sight when he slowed and called. Where are you? Behind ya. Huh? No you're not, I didn't pass you.

When he was below, the boat had done a 180, that quick, and he had no idea. He later told me he was really confused by the surroundings. I guess.

I learned really early on, when running at night I had a tendency to stray to starboard. Mostly in black inlets where there was no delineation; land to sea, no visible landmarks

Sure! In fog. We have no autopilot, and being a planing hull we tend to wander at low speeds. Amazing how quickly we can be heading 90 degrees off course or more.

its happened to me twice too. Both times I stopped the boat and started from scratch with multiple bearings to locate my position. Not sure how I got so lost but it is a little scary.

Almost every night when I get up to...ah, er....You know...

boatpoker; said:

Not sure how I got so lost but it is a little scary.

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Yeah, sorta like vertigo. Then you play the "what if" in your mind.

Probably happened to me several hundred times....that's where training to grasp info from instruments quickly and calm yourself and focus on letting external guidance reset you internal gyro is critical.


When we finally got RADAR in the smaller, newer USCG helos...I'll bet those disorientation fits at night in the fog screamed to half or less.

Nothing but training and practice will prevent bad stuff from happening....even the best get disoriented enough in some conditions if it weren't for auto pilot and other take control automated systems...more accident would happen like the old days.

Like getting towed or going aground.... do anything long enough in all different environments and those will happen as well as getting disoriented.

Humans are just that....human. Remember you are much more susceptible when fatigued or not feeling well or dehydrated or dietary imbalance, etc....

Before the days of GPS, it used to happen to me all the time. Most of the time it only takes a few seconds to get reoriented, but there were a few times at night where it took much longer and much time looking at the chart to get reoriented.

When this happens, and in the case of any uncertainty about anything, we have found following the simple rule of stopping the boat (unless dangerous to do so) to be the most important step. Electronic gizmos providing an overload of information can be as much to blame for some folks as no information is to others.

Yep. While trying to outrun it heading home, I got caught in a severe summer thunderstorm while single handing a 24' sailboat. When it passed I was going in exactly the opposite direction I thought I was headed.

Lessons learned:

• Mount the compass in a better spot.
• Drop the anchor and ride it out.
• As soon as you know you're not going to make it head for the nearest dock.

I was on the Severn River and had plenty of options. It was my first season and I was learning fast!

Never really gotten totally turned around, but I have gotten pretty disoriented a couple of time at night. Oddly enough, both times I remember, it was in areas I was quite familiar with (once in the Cape Fear River and once on the lower Waccamaw River). Both times I got disoriented because of the number of lights and a sudden feeling I did not know what they all were. At night, I could not easily pick out the lights I was looking for. Best advice from some above posters-Stop!-take stock and figure it out.

LOL.....Yup. Missed the correct entrance into the ICW off the Pamlico river once...After an hour, my wife called my attention to a (low) fixed bridge ahead. Ooops! Backtracked and only lost 2 hour there. Stuff happens.

For what it's worth, it was a scenic ride down that (wrong) tributary!

Was running in fog in the ICW south of Tampa Bay. Could see the stern light of the boat ahead and just kept following him. After a few minutes he hailed me saying, "Captain, not sure where you're headed but I just turned off the main channel on the way to my dock!"

Oops. Fortunately, no harm no foul.

Never been lost in a boat unless I fell asleep at the wheel. But I wandered around in a field in South Texas quail hunting in the fog and it took me about 2 hours to find my truck.LOL

Yes, in fog and a swift, swirling current. Both radar and GPS update too slowly, and by the time you notice something's wrong you've spun 180 degrees (or more) off course. After a couple of those, I learned to use the compass to maintain course, and only check the other displays to verify position. Overall a good habit to get into.

I got so twisted around once on the Columbia River in a very dense fog that my track must have looked like the track a worm makes in soft mud.


I was between the south shore of the river and a long, slender island. I kept thinking I was headed upstream and would find myself heading straight to one shore or the other. I'd get straightened around and within just a few minutes I'd be headed back toward a shore.


I finally got smart and when I could see the shore and knew I was paralleling it, I got a compass reading. Bingo, I ended up running out of the fog in just a few minutes and was right where I wanted to be, but it took me an hour to get there.

Cap't Tom-you raise a good point-The Compass! And not the compass on a plotter, An old fashioned compass. With all the electronics, I think many of us have forgotten about steering a compass course. I began boating learning to steer a compass course as a mate on a charter boat. All we had was RDF and then Loran A. My Captain, a real old salt, could leave the dock, run a course and judge speed and conditions and them have his clients drop lines on a rock ledge 35 miles offshore. He could hit the same ledge every single day, no matter the conditions. Like you, even around the generally closed in areas in the PNW, I still pay close attention to my compass on the helm. My old paper charts have common compass courses written on them.

Sometimes at the end of a long passage my exhausted brain could make any light say what I wanted it to say, and any headland change shape to become the final turn.

Less problem now with GPS and chartplotter, but still something for me to be wary of.

Something like this happened to me at work a year or two ago. We had just left a port on the east shore of Lake Michigan, and were heading north. I was informed by the engineers that they would be switching some power systems around, which was routine.

The standard blink happened, and rather than bounce back immediately, half of the electronics cut out. The gyro compass lost power, and started sending incorrect signals to the radar and plotter, which I didn't realize at first. About 10 seconds later, a dense fog bank rolled in from the west. Since the auto pilot was still engaged, the ship started turning to follow the faulty gyro heading, which manifested itself as a right turn on the radar and plotter, but when i looked at the magnetic compass, I was starting to turn LEFT. With no frame of reference out the window... It became really disorienting, really quickly. If I was in the middle of the lake, It wouldn't have been so scary, but I was only a couple of miles off the beach, and there were plenty of small boats around. I stopped the engines until I could make sense of what the hell was happening. It was pretty sketchy.

It happened to us once on the ICW in an area we hadn't been to previously. It just did not look like it did on a chart or like we pictured it. We thought for a moment maybe we weren't where we thought we were and we needed to choose one way or the other. So, we waited a moment, looked again. On the chart the channel angling to the left looked much wider than the one to the right. It was actually narrower visibly. We were at high tide in an area of an 8' swing. Our guess was that at low tide it would come much closer to looking as it did in the charts.

I must say we've done it far more in a car. Get talking and suddenly realize we have no idea if we've reached our turn and passed it or not there yet. That's when you're very happy there is GPS.

psneeld said:

Remember you are much more susceptible when fatigued or not feeling well or dehydrated or dietary imbalance, etc.

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Excellent point.
On the bike, my hands would always tell me when I was dehydrated; crampy and weak on the clutch/brake. It always amazed me how quickly a big slug of water would fix it.

I realize many oppose bottled water but referring here to the need for hydration. you'll never see me on a boat without an open bottle of water at my side. You'll rarely see me at home or on land without a bottle. At one time, long long ago, before I got smarter, it was a Coke. Always. First regular, then diet. But from childhood until the age of 35 or so that was it. Then replace by water. Haven't had a soft drink in over 10 years.

Ran 10 miles past the bay I was looking for in a C-Dory in light rain and fog using a chart plotter with a small screen with no route plotted in waters I had never been in before. When we ran into floating ice, I knew we were getting near the Columbia Glacier, just not exactly where. Five minutes of looking at features confirmed the chart plotter location and then I plotted a route. Later in the same boat in fog and heavy snow, I couldn't drive a straight line no matter what I did until I started using the compass. That was much better. Now I use Coastal Explorer with a 16 inch monitor and always layout routes with an autopilot maintaining course. That way when I turn the helm over to the wife I can just tell her to follow the black line.

Normally, I don't have a problem, but the last GF's house always screwed my sense of direction up. There were 5-6 short roads in the neighborhood to take getting there or leaving. Needless to say, I saw the scenic route more than once.

During an overcast day some 40 years ago, went around a Delta island 2 1/2 times while driving an automobile before realizing I was going in circles. (Haven't I seen that barn before?) The island's exit wasn't obvious. Does that qualify?

To me...spatial disorientation from 3 dimensional sense input is a whole lot different than being lost on a road.


One will make you puke in a second if it is just right,,,the other isn't much more devastating than being embarrassed.


Hawgwash said it in post one...not many may actually know what he means.

In our first boat we were coming out of Adams Creek into the Neuse, we got hit by a fast moving squall line. We thought we would get out to open water before it got to us, but JUST as the channel does this little whoop-d-doo, we couldn't see 10' in front of the boat. Bess was on the bow trying to see what she could see. I had no GPS on the lower helm and no auto pilot. When I looked down, the compass was spinning like it was powered by a motor. Try as I might, I never really got a handle on it and I am sure we did at least one, if not two, full 360's in a very tight space. Luck for us, the line of showers lasted just a few minutes.

Did you ever close your eye and spin around in your office chair? When you open your eyes, there is always that funny feeling when you aren't facing the way you think you should be. Well, that event... was JUST like that!

psneeld said:

To me...spatial disorientation from 3 dimensional sense input is a whole lot different than being lost on a road.

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Years ago when I was doing my primary training for my private pilots license, my instructor had me do a lot of unusual attitude recoveries. I would close my eyes and he would spend 5 minutes flying the plane in such a way as to fool my equilibrium into thinking we were straight and level, when we were really in a steep climbing turn with rapidly falling airspeed. Or it would feel like we were in a steep bank turn when in reality we were straight and level. I enjoyed it, but it was always a surprise.

As soon as I got good that that, he made me put on a hood and my recovery had to be entirely on instruments (this was only for a primate ticket that would be used entirely under VFR). I know what Hawgwash is talking about. It is pretty amazing to experience.

Not being familiar with the area, I was slowly heading South from Upper Pt. Judith Pond, RI in a heavy early morning fog and lost the channel. I began to experience a bit of vertigo and started to worry about grounding when from out the fog a boat came barely into view and without any prompting from me the Capt. yelled steer 240 degrees which cleared my head and brought me directly back to a channel marker. This enabled me to regain my bearing. When I looked back to shout out a thank you he had disappeared back into the fog. At the time it felt kind of comforting and ghostly like you might find in an old sea story.

It happened to me once. Leaving a harbor at night in fog. Lights marked the ends of a breakwater. At the end of the main channel, with jetties on each side, just before the breakwater, it was necessary to turn 90 degrees to port, travel 150' past the breakwater, then back 90 degrees to starboard. Conditions also included heavy swell and a loud foghorn a few hundred feet away. Anyway, somehow I got disoriented and turned almost 180 degrees to port, heading toward the beach, which of course had no echo return. In my moment of confusion, I was convinced that I knew better than my instruments which way to go. Fortunately, I ignored my instincts and turned hard to starboard before hitting the beach. It was as if I was in the twilight zone.

psneeld said:

Probably happened to me several hundred times....that's where training to grasp info from instruments quickly and calm yourself and focus on letting external guidance reset you internal gyro is critical.

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In fact, this happens much more to us then people realize. We remember it when boating, flying, etc because the consequences are many times scary if not dire.

We have a map in our brain for spatial orientation. In addition we have timers and mechanism to measure distance.

It's kept us alive for millions of years.

So even in the face of facts telling us differently, we ignore the facts. Only after do we think what was i thinking.

Just yesterday i had to go to a city office downtown near Wall Street. As I'm walking east, the few blocks from the subway to the address, I pictured the building on the north side of the street. As i get to the address, i realize it's across the street.

I get in and out in record time, less then 20 minutes.
Having now an hour to kill, i decide to get a beer in a well known bar I'd passed.

I start out walking "west" then my reasoning really got strange:
1. I don't see the bar i was looking for, but instead see a few different places, also well known that i know i had not passed before.

2. So, i look at Google maps, instead of being back on the west side, it shows me to be almost at the East River. My thought: "Google is confused again "

3. I wonder why it's so bright to the north. Strange i think, feeling I'm so observant.

4. Finally, with the East River in plain sight and Brooklyn too, I realize I'd been walking east the whole time.

From the get go, my brain put the office on the north side, so upon exit, i turned right instead of left and then proceeded to NOT ignore, but to rationalize away, why NOTHING ELSE, was where it should have been.