Every other navigation aid can be taken from you. This one cannot.

Dead reckoning is the practice of carrying your position forward from the last place you knew it. Ffrom a heading, a speed, an elapsed time, and an honest account of what the tide and the wind have done to you in between. It is the oldest method of navigation and the only one that depends on nothing outside the boat: no fix, no coastline, no signal, no sky. Every other method is a way of checking it. When the fog closes in, when the battery dies, when there is nothing left to take a bearing on, this is what remains.

VAKA Navigator is a training application for people who want to understand how it works, and to practice doing it. It covers the full chain a navigator actually runs at sea: the 1-in-60 rule and the course to steer, tidal streams and the aggregate vector over a long leg, speed through the water, leeway, springs and neaps, compass variation and deviation, the estimated position with its error, distance off by angles, pilotage and depth. Every calculation is built in and worked twice - the mental shortcut you use with wet hands and no time, and the exact geometry beside it, so you learn when the shortcut can be trusted and when it lies.

It runs in any browser. It works offline once loaded. Nothing is tracked. Nothing is stored.

Position is not received. It is reasoned.