“This shows us five miles south-southeast of our dead-reckoning,” he said to the captain.
“Are those bearings dependable?” was the reply.
“Our radio compass has been giving us bearings accurate to within one degree without fail ever since we left Boston, and the shore stations are regularly dependable to within less than that. Besides, we have here three bearings and they check each other reasonably close, making the fix practically a certainty.”
“Have them repeated,” said the skipper.
“Aye, aye, sir.”
The message was sent and in three minutes a report was received corroborating the previous bearings.
“How do you account for the error in dead-reckoning?” asked the captain.
“I don’t know,” said the navigator; “but you remember the seven destroyers that went aground on the Pacific coast in 1923 because they ignored the radio-compass bearings and trusted their dead-reckoning.”
“That’s right,” said the skipper; “we can’t afford to do that. What about sounding?”
“That wouldn’t help us much here, the bottom’s too irregular.”