Anyone other than me remember the days before LORAN and GPS

[WalkinDead]

Back when you has to navigate with a speedometer, watch, and compass; it made for some rather exciting days. You had to use trigonometry and factor in windage to get your bearings and binoculars to find the buoys. "Fish finders" were still a new thing and used mostly just to find the structure. I still have the charts we used with headings and distance/time/speeds marked on them.
There were buoys back then to mark the reefs; most, if not all of them, are gone now.
Man, I'm older than dirt...

 

[1eyefishing]

Yeah, before Loran was before my time.
When I blurted out in 6 pack class, "oh yeah, I got it. It's trigonometry," everybody looked at me like I had lost my mind or they hated me.

 

[blakely]

One of the worst arguments I ever saw was between my dad and grandpa after we got our first Loran unit. My dad was using the Loran to put us where we were supposed to fish but my grandpa didn't think we were in the right place because it didn't match with his dead reckoning.

Made for a long day on the boat.

 

[Bjrink]

I remember scrolling through rolls of paper graph trips looking at all the salmon and trout on Lake Michigan. I can’t imagine how good the fishing would be. The new tech my brother uses on Kodiak has allowed them to pinpoint and harvest giant halibut.

 

[Redman54]

I was young, but I still remember fishing with my dad and grandpa out of Sapelo Sound in a 22 foot Cobia, with one seat. All my grandpa had was a compass and his watch. We would fish well outside the sight of land on many occasions, and always caught fish. He knew those waters better than anyone. Spent most of my younger days on the water with no GPS. You learn every sandbar and mudflat.

 

[GLS]

Loran has been around since WWII. I used dead reckoning in the mid 1970s to fish the Gulf Stream until I was dead wrong and came back 40 miles north of where I departed W2. i was so far north that my charts didn't have the sea bouy (6HI?) I found going back in on my charts. I hit the sea bouy at St. Helena Sound and was given bearings by the Coast Guard to the Wassaw Sea Bouy. I ran out of gas in Tybee Roads and thew a hook out as a Thunderstorm hit us. Back then the CG was in the tow business and we tied off at Lazaretto at 130 a.m. Miserable night. My Bertram 25' followed a 34' Hatteras out that morning and the plan was to fish with him in sight. He ran off and left me and despite him knocking the chop down, it was still too rough to keep up.
After that debacle, a borrowed RDF helped me get back using 630 a.m. radio towers as the go to point. It still took a lot of luck to find W2, especially in a chop. Bigger yachts had Loran units but they were the size of a large microwave oven. I eventually bought a small Loran unit, I forget whether it was C or A, but it was the one most common before the improved automatic version. My unit's main feature was size. Electronics were being minaturized. I'd set the two sine curves on the numbers where I wanted to head and when they overlapped, I was there. It was notorious for not working at night because of sky waves. The later version worked at night. It was one of the happiest days in my life when I sold the boat in 1977. I miss offshore fishing almost as much as having a root canal. Gil

 

[georgia_home]

Used to structure and wreck fish the mid Atlantic coast back in the late 70s and early 80s

The loran on the first few boats were pretty expensive and about the size of small microwave ovens now. Start the engines and the units and by the time you cleared the jetty you were dialed in. They only gave you “here”

The last couple years, a few of the newer units were smaller and started to add nav functions.

Course keeping and time/distance/speed etc.

I thought I heard the last few loran sites were decommissioned a while back, but I could be mistaken (and didn’t feel like googling)

Now what about the spinny arm depth finder that actually marked paper with a little ?stylus?

It also had a little red light thing too as it spun... none of that near photorealistic stuff you folks are packing today.

 

[flconch53]

In those days the fishing charts gave you a compass heading and the distance from a bouy at a pass. It was all in knowing how fast your boat went and was your compass accurate from thete.

 

[plumber_1969]

Makes me glad I grew up fishing the coastal marshes of Southern Louisiana and when the weather was right, we'd run offshore in big jonboats to the rigs. The maps were good for navigating the marshes that are now bays.

 

[saltysenior]

who started with an APN-9 ???