In the Age of Sail, Quartermasters employed a variety of physical and temporal reference points—landmarks, celestial bodies, sunrise and sunset times—and tools such as sextants, compasses, and sounding lines to ensure safe passage to the desired destination.
Today, Sailors in the Quartermaster rating (QM) obviously have high-tech tools at their disposal that helps ensure the accuracy of their calculations: even a landlubbing Iphone enthusiast, for instance, can get an amazingly accurate fix on their location in just a matter of seconds. But what those unfamiliar with the QM rating don’t realize is that Naval vessels are traversing vast expanses of ocean where things like satellite data might not be available at the moment it’s needed, or that any number of factors might causes failures of the electronics that are used to receive, display, and coordinate that data.
Consequently, Quartermasters to this day are taught the use of tools and techniques that were in use in one form or fashion many decades (sometimes centuries) ago. For example, QM Sailors use magnetic compasses which point to magnetic north rather than true north; to determine their accuracy, they use gyrocompasses, first used in the United States in 1908, that are fixed toward true north. Of course, the gyrocompasses are not completely immune to error, so their accuracy is corroborated using celestial observations.
Dead Reckoning tracks based on present location, ship speed, and direction but which don’t take into account the effects of wind, tides, current, or waves are still employed; in fact, Dead Reckoning positions are plotted at least every hour. Quartermasters are tasked with determining the ship’s position using GPS...and using sextant angles…and using “running fixes.” In addition to these seemingly antiquated methods, Quartermasters also must calculate rudimentary data such as times for sunrise and sunset (and moonrise, moonset, and twilight) and employ visual observations to verify the ship’s position.
Should you weary of reading endless news stories of how robots are going to take over all of mankind’s jobs, fear not: in the Navy, at least, a Sailor in the Quartermaster rating will likely be standing over his cybernetic shipmate in order to verify his work.
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