If it were me, I’d assume backup paper navigation charts and either a handheld battery powered backup GPS or my smartphone that has an app to parse data from the GPS chip. Could use primarily dead reckoning plus turn the phone on every couple hours to update true location. Most sailors are using paper charts for tricky sections anyways — you just normally have a constant GPS location provided by your navigation system.
There are also lots of established shipping lanes you could find that would be relatively densely traveled and give you periodic feedback for which direction to go. A bit more dangerous due to collisions without lights but as long as your retroreflector is hoisted, big ships should see you clearly on radar. plus you’ll generally be swapping sleep shifts and always have someone manning the helm on the sailboat, though seeing large vessels at night can be somewhat more difficult.
Mostly all that's right. We had three phones and a few battery packs (tho we'd exhausted them more quickly than expected and lost one to rain) because the paper charts aboard were from the late 80s when the boat was built and were all for the Pacific ocean it was built to sail.
The only other complicating factor was that due to the August Florida heat, nobody really had the luxury of sleep for the first couple of days.
> Most sailors are using paper charts for tricky sections anyways — you just normally have a constant GPS location provided by your navigation system.
My experience in Marine SAR is that this is no longer true. Apps like Navionics, SeaPilot, etc - often without any backup at all - are by far the most common form of navigation.
Yeah. I've spent a lot of time learning charts and a terribly small amount of time actually using them. In this case, we didn't have the right ones anyway.
There are also lots of established shipping lanes you could find that would be relatively densely traveled and give you periodic feedback for which direction to go. A bit more dangerous due to collisions without lights but as long as your retroreflector is hoisted, big ships should see you clearly on radar. plus you’ll generally be swapping sleep shifts and always have someone manning the helm on the sailboat, though seeing large vessels at night can be somewhat more difficult.