A question asked at sea

In 1982 I was aboard Shelandra, a Ramsgate trawler we had fitted out for marine surveying. She was already part of Goodwins history: her skipper, Tom Brown, and his boat had been central to the discovery, in June 1979, of the wreck of HMS Stirling Castle, a 70-gun warship lost on the Sands in the Great Storm of 1703. Aboard Shelandra we were demonstrating over the Goodwin Sands the kind of geophysical techniques the archaeological world did not yet have to hand, using sidescan sonar, sub-bottom profilers and magnetometers to find wreck sites without a diver ever entering the water.

On the way out to a site one day, the archaeologist Dr Mark Redknap and David Lyon, ship's historian at the National Maritime Museum, wondered aloud how much easier the divers' work would be if we could predict the tidal streams running at the moment a ship was known to have foundered. Search the seabed downstream of where she went down, they reasoned, and a host of small finds might be waiting. That comment resonated with me. I realised that a PC predicting the tidal streams would be a useful thing for both the archaeologist and the navigator. Turning it over in the weeks that followed, I saw it reached further still, to the diver planning a slack-water window and the fisherman working the tide.

A career in salt water

I had come to that boat by way of a career change in 1975, when I started as an engineer in a small team of hydrographers, oceanographers and geophysicists setting up and running survey vessels around the world. We measured the water with current meters and tide gauges, mapped the seabed with echo-sounders, sidescan sonar and magnetometers, and probed below it with Boomers, Sparkers and Pingers, then produced the charts and reports on what we found. I was responsible for a small inshore vessel for testing and developing equipment. It was hands-on, salt-water work, and it taught me how the sea actually behaves.

From the Goodwins to a garage full of sonar

The archaeological work grew into something real. With the support of Wimpey Laboratories (UK), who employed me and generously lent both time and equipment, a group of us surveyed over the Goodwin Sands, and it led to the founding of a charity, first the Goodwins Archaeological Survey and later the Marine Archaeological Survey. The offshore industry donated its old and unserviceable equipment, and being an engineer I coaxed most of it back to life. For a while my garage held little else but cables, sonars, magnetometers and navigation gear.

When our family came along, and as founder members moved on or passed away, the charity gradually wound down, and by 1993 it had closed. But the question asked on that boat about tidal streams stayed with me.

Neptune is born

By 1990, no longer going to sea for a living, I missed it, and Sandra and I bought a small sailing boat which we kept on the Solent at Beaulieu. Working out the course to steer with the tidal streams around the Isle of Wight, while also being Dad to two small boys aboard, was no easy thing. So I finally built the tool that idea had promised, years before, at first simply for my own use. Other berth holders took an interest, then more people did, and Neptune quietly became a small hobby business that Sandra ran from the back office at home. It was never meant to be large. My living came from elsewhere, in electronics and sensors for the water analysis of steam boiler water and engine cooling water for commercial shipping, together with some very interesting side projects. Neptune was the thing I did for love of the sea.

A harder purpose

After our sons graduated in 2010, we began to notice health difficulties, minor at first and slowly progressing, that in time led to a diagnosis of Myotonic Dystrophy. It is a rare, progressive neuro-muscular condition, and coming to understand it, and the fact that there is as yet no cure, was a hard road for all of us.

It was in a conversation with Sandra, facing all of this, that we wondered whether Neptune might do more than help sailors. We built the Android™ apps with that hope in mind: that through Neptune we could help raise awareness of Myotonic Dystrophy and the other muscular dystrophies, and that it might encourage students into the life sciences, a field of research that badly needs them. Myotonic Dystrophy affects at least one person in every 8,000, and only a handful of clinicians and researchers work on it in the UK. The wider picture is starker still: around 1 in 17 people will be affected by a rare disease at some point in their lives, and for most of those conditions there is no cure.

Back, by demand

We stepped back in 2024, with the intention of retiring. But the requests never quite stopped, and so Neptune is returning, rebuilt and brought up to date for today's Android™ phones.

How you can help

Using Neptune helps in itself, by keeping this small venture alive. We keep any fundraising entirely separate from the software, so that money raised for the cause goes where it should and Neptune can stand on its own as a business. If you would like to support research and families living with Myotonic Dystrophy, the Myotonic Dystrophy Support Group and Muscular Dystrophy UK are good places to begin, and we will share news of our own fundraising here as it happens.

Les Emptage
Neptune Navigation Software