Pace Counting and Dead Reckoning

Description

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Tags: Dave Canterbury,Survival,Bushcraft,Archery,Pathfinder,Land navigation,Map Reading,Pacing Beads,Pace Counting,Navigation,The Pathfinder School

Video Transcription

morning guys Dave Canterbury Pathfinder School I'm going to continue today with our navigation series and talk about dead reckoning and to talk about dead reckoning we need to get into pace County because pace County along with an azimuth we're barring from a map from a known location to an unknown location in a straight-line distance will give you dead reckoning that should tell you how long it's going to take you to get there or when you should be there along with the proper direction of travel and that's called dead reckoning so to understand that reckoning we first have to understand pace County and how to use what's called pacing beads we're going to discuss that during this video so stay with me guys okay let's talk about pacing beads real fast before we talk about how to utilize pacing beads pacing beads are only a counting system kind of like an abacus that you're going to use to calculate distance and depending on whether you're doing it in meters or miles under kilometers or miles I should say you're going to do it two different ways what I'm going to show you today is I'm going to show you how to use your pacing beads set up in kilometers

I generally travel and use my map in kilometers because everything works out in series of tens and hundreds and I like that it makes it real simple miles are a little bit more difficult for me to calculate so I tend to stay with things that are easy I like simple so basically I have two strands of beads here I have a whistle on the bottom don't pay attention to that's what I use for classes my compass is in here and I have two strands of rope that have beads on them here of paracord one has four beads on one side the other has nine beads if you're doing this in miles it has to be different you're going to do it in eighths of a mile so you're going to have eight beats instead of nine and things of that nature but let's talk about kilometers for this video that's the easiest to understand so we want nine beats here and four beats here what that gives us is an abacus or calculator to calculate a five kilometer distance and what you're going to do is you're going to figure out your pace we're going to talk about that in a minute and then you will take your beads and you'll start them at the top and there's a knot there that you can see where I've pushed those beads up against a knot and what you're going to do is you're going to start walking and Counting your paces and we'll talk about that in a minute and when you get to a hundred meters or whatever your pace count is in my particular case it's about 67 on normal flat terrain so when I count my paces and I get to 67 I drop one of these beads on the side that has nine that means I've now walked 100 meters I start my count over again for my paces and when I get to 67 again I would drop another bead now I've walked 200 meters and I would follow that all the way through until I had dropped all nine beads to where I had walking 900 meters then I would on the next count drop one bead on this side which means I've now walked one kilometer then I would move these beads back to the top and start over one kilometer plus 100 meters 200 meters 300 meters and so on and then I drop another bead on this side when I get to 2 kilometers 3 kilometers 4 kilometers and when these 9 beads are down again after 4 kilometers I know that the next 100 meters is going to be the 5k mark so this gives me a way to track navigation as far as distance traveled of 5 kilometers or up to 5 kilometers now let's talk about how you factor your paste count so you can use these beads and you can use anything for paste counting it could be rocks in your pocket

it could be knots in a piece of paracord it can be beads of any kind that you can slide up and down like an abacus just like this it doesn't matter we saw something very similar to this on our website that's basically two strands of beads just like this white skull beads I think they are on paracord so let's talk about factoring our paste count because that's important ok the next thing that we're going to have to figure out is what our actual paste count is and to do this you need to factor in several things it's not as easy as you just go out on the street and Mark off a hundred meters and walk that 100 meters and count

and that gives you a pace count that's going to be accurate in the woods it's not quite that simple what you need to do is you need to get something that's 100 meter length whether it be a piece of rope 100 meter tape something of that nature and take it out with you and check multiple terrains because your piece count will change from flat terrain to uneven or rough terrain to uphill and downhill your page count will change for all of those things so I suggest that you take a notebook and put a table in it and put flat uneven uphill downhill and beside that you would write your pace count now the way you factor your pace count is going to be on the step of the same foot so if I start to walk and I put my left foot down first and then my right foot when my left foot hits the ground again that's one pace so it's a half one 1/2 - every time I see my left foot strikes the ground that's one pace for the second time now if I started my right foot it can be the other way around right foot left foot right foot left foot half pace half pace so figure out which foot you're going to count your pace is off of left to right depending on how you walk and count your paces off the same foot striking the ground every time then what you're going to get is you're going to get a different set of numbers and I'm just going to make a couple numbers up here real quick on flat ground let's say it was 67 on uneven let's say it was let's say it was 70 uphill you're not going to be able to step this far going uphill so you're going to shorten your pace is going to shorten which is going to increase the amount of pieces that you have so let's say it was 73 and then downhill you're going to be able to open your stride up going downhill so it's going to be a smaller number so let's say it's 65 then what I'm going to do is I'm going to look at my map that I'm going to travel and by terrain Association which we talked about earlier in this video we know by looking at the map what type of terrain we're going to be traveling and it may be a combination of all of these let's say that there's no flag around that we're going to be walking you see they're gonna be uneven uphill or downhill and let's say that the majority of it is going to be both uphill and downhill with just a little bit of unevenness in there but mostly we're going to be doing this up and down up and down up and down if you're in the state of Ohio Kentucky southern Indiana places like that Virginia it's gonna be a lot of this it's not gonna be a lot of this let me tell you so what you're gonna do is you're gonna average those numbers so if we figure that part of this uphill part is downhill some of us on uneven ground I can take those three numbers add them together okay eight six and seven thirteen seven more 22 and late divided by three follow my hillbilly math dividing by three gives me an average of those numbers three goes into 26 times that's 18 28 3 times 7 is 28 so 67 is going to be my average pace count that understanding is what I need for dead reckoning now when I see my azmuth

or I plug in my bearing to a known location I know that my pace count for every hundred meters is going to be 67 I can look at my map and I can measure on my map how far I think that's going to be in meters and as I'm walking I'm dropping pacing beads every sixty seven paces I'm dropping a pacing bead and if my target area is let's say one kilometer away when I've dropped nine beads down for 900 meters and I'm getting ready to drop the next bead down I should be right on top of where I'm supposed to be as long as I've kept the needle in the doghouse friend in the shed wherever you want to call it and I know that I'm walking in a straight line for my bearing dead reckoning would tell me I should be right on top of my target at that point and that is where pace counting comes in very handy especially for longer distances if I'm shooting an azimuth from one hilltop to another and that hilltop was 2.5 k away according to my map and I start pace County it might take me an hour or an hour and a half to get there but once I pace count I'm gonna I'm gonna lose track of the time of day unless I have a watch or how far I've walked by pace County I can keep track it out in my head very easily say hey

I've walked too far and I've missed my target because I've walked four or five hundred meters more than I should have and you won't want to just give up after 100 meters too far because things are going to be changing there's variables all the time this average number is only that it's an average so it may not be exactly perfect I would walk a couple 300 meters too far before I decided I'd miss my target then if I don't see my target I might say okay wait a minute let me travel back in a reverse azmuth to my last known point or a reverse azimuth back exactly 300 meters to where I think I was supposed to be and let me take another look at things and see where I'm supposed to be that's how you can use pace counting to your advantage okay so let's go back to our map for a minute guys blame my compass on the map getting it lined up in a grid square at the corner of a grid square and figuring my declination difference if I move this map until the needles in the doghouse I've got it associated to the terrain now I can good book fit this back to north not worry about it the map appears exactly as I'm looking at the terrain going back to our exercises from the past videos traveling from this hilltop to the wetland area I can lay my compass on the map right in the middle of the wetland area turn the dial so that the needles in the doghouse and that will give me a bearing of travel which is about 80 degrees or there abouts as long as I keep the needle and doghouse while I'm walking I'm walking a straight line on that bearing now here's what the dead reckoning comes in or the pace counting to equate to dead reckoning now I can take my scale on the side of my compass which is in centimeters and we looked at the scale of this map 1 centimeter equalled 100 meters that's what I like everything simple so if I measure that I've got about 7 centimeters to go to the center of that wetland area that tells me I've got to travel 700 meters what that means is that when I'm traveling and I'm pace counting if we look at our average pace count I believe was something like 67 68 something like that I can't remember exactly what it was now but what I'm going to do is as I'm traveling I'm going to be dropping these beads every time I get to that number

so if it's let's just say 74 even number sake a purpose here when I count to 70 on the same foot I drop a bead what this is telling me is that when I have seven beads down well I've got to the seventh bead and there's nine beads on here so when I've got seven down at the bottom like this I should be right on top of this area now I don't have now I'm not using any kind of backstop this becomes my backstop this tells me I've traveled as far as I'm supposed to travel and it's given me a dead reckoning to that location if I'm right here now at seven and I don't see the location I'm gonna travel a little further but I might even see it before I get to seven because your pace counts going to be off a little bit it's gonna vary remember that you're talking about an average so I might travel another 100 meters maybe a little further before I would turn around and backtrack my steps on a reverse azimuth but once I get seven beads down if everything is correct on this map and I've got my distance factored in right I've got my azmuth right in my pace counts right then I can say pretty surely that if I travel on this bearing this many beads or this many paces I'm going to get to that water area that becomes my backstop at that point to tell me hey you've gone far enough okay guys well I hope that simple explanation of dead reckoning and pacing beads helped you out go out into the field get your pace count set up on different types of terrain and get them log in a notebook keep them with you with your compass in your map then you will be able to practice dead reckoning on your own and you'll be able to adjust things as needed because that may not work out perfect a lot of people I've seen classes tend to overstep when there's practicing their paste count in other words they lay the hundred meters out and they get excited and they try to step out you don't want to do that you want to walk that as you normally would walk if you're going to be carrying a heavy backpack when you travel something like that put it on it's going to change your pace count it's going to slow you down it's going to decrease your pace so make sure that you think about all those things when you're factoring your pace count into your notebook I'm Dave Canberra at the Pathfinder school I appreciate you join me for another video I thank you for everything you do for me for my school my family my affiliates my sponsors and my friends I'll be back to another video

as soon as I can thanks guys you