Admiral puts the Scillies in their place

Press, 31 August 1977, Page 24

Admiral puts the Scillies in their place

By

CAROL WRIGHT,

“Sundav l imes.” London

David Haslam is planning to shift the Scilly Isles. To be precise, he wants them moved 71 yards north and 83 yards west. And that’s not all. He is then going to start shoving the Shetlands exactly 69 yards south and 129 yards west. Finally, he plans to move the entire British mainland 100 yards.

At 54. trim and waistcoated, he bears little resemblance to a modernday Hercules. He is, in fact, a rear admiral and hydrographer to the Royal Navy — responsible, with a team of 950 in Taunton, Somerset, for charting the seas round Britain’s shores and the exact position of the shores themselves.

With the help of the six United States navigation satellites at present circling the Earth. Haslam and his team have discovered that Britain and

her offshore Islands have not been accurately positioned on the charts. The earlier map-drawers did pretty well using the stars and mercury levels, but the satellites, which can measure the dimensions of the entire Earth to within five yards, show they were a bit out.

In some parts of the world, they have been shown to be miles out — the west coast of South America was recently found to be three to four miles out of true. Haslam is determined that the 3500 admiralty charts started in 1795 shall be as accurate as possible. Many are still based on surveys more than 100 years old. “No motorist or pilot would accept maps as old as this,” he says. "Sailors should not be jeopardised either.”

The old naval maxim, •Put your faith In God

and the Admiralty chart,’’ has certainly been shaken. But Admiral Haslam stresses that the inaccuracies should cause little danger to shipping or aircraft. Sailors or pilots heading in the general direction of the Scillies or

the Shetlands will know exactly where they are once they spot the coast. But a few yards can make a vital difference. The Frigg natural gas field, for example, is on the median line between Britain and Norway. So last summer experts from Haslam’s department joined a Norwegian team on one of the rigs there, while others went to the tops of three Scottish and three Norwegian moun-

tains. In five days, 140 satellite passes were noted and the true position of the field agreed. The age of the supertanker has added to the hvdrographer’s problems. Ten years ago surveys were carried out to check

depths for large ships like Ark Royal and Queen Elizabeth II with draughts under 40 feet. Now more than 500 container ships and concrete oil rig platforms have draughts of 80 feet or more. “These giants have turned deep, navigable waters to shallow seas. It is frightening,” says Haslam. “The South China seas are extremely dangerous and much is uncharted. Places that are pinpointed

have stem names like North Danger Reef. But large ships carrying ore from north-west Australia to Japan are using this sea, as they are now too big to go through the Torres Strait.”

This month, Haslam and his team will complete the revision of 71 United Kingdom charts — “our best sellers” — to show the new international system of buoys. This replaces 30 separate systems which in the past have led to tragedy through lack of recognition. When the Texaco Caribbean sank in the Strait of Dover, Trinity House marked her with buoys, but a German and a Greek ship which did not understand the coding were both wrecked on the same spot.

Haslam has already succeeded in moving Tristan da Cunha a mile south on the map. but shifting the Shetland* and th* SctUiaa

will take a long time. Only a quarter of the British continental shelf has been surveyed in detail and Britain has only 10 survey vessels to chart the rest, so the less vital extremities will have to go to the end of the queue. Haslam is also holding fire until the 47nation strong International Hydro-graphic Organisation agrees a world datum for all charts. In the end, the admiral’s claim to posterity may not be for moving Britain to where she belongs, but for Haslam’s Reef, discovered off the Solomon Islands, and (to his person a 1 chagrin) for Haslam’s Patches, found in 1952 in the centre of rich oil fields in the Persian Gulf. These coral pinnacles were so named by colleagues because of the straggly results on Haslam’s chin after a ship’s beard-growing competition.