Piloting

Piloting is navigation — knowing where a vessel is, where it is going, and what lies between. It is a separate accomplishment from handling the ship, which is Seamanship’s business: a pilot who cannot work a sail is common, and so is a fine sailor who could not find a coast twice.

The craft is pilotage in shallow, dangerous or unfamiliar water — reading soundings, bearings and marks, judging tide and current, and knowing which channel of a harbour approach is the one that is still there this year — together with dead reckoning offshore, which is arithmetic and therefore leans on Mathematics.

For a voyage as a whole, the pilot’s skill is folded in as a Secondary Modifier to the crew’s collective seamanship, and it is very often what decides whether a passage is merely slow or actually lost.

Weather lore. A pilot reads the sky as a matter of professional survival, and may test Piloting to predict temperature, precipitation and wind for the next four-hour watch, resolved exactly as under Agriculture.