WARNING: Intra-service smack talk ahead.
Sooooo. I have actually trained with that Riverine squadron. also the one on the east coast. Those guys (the coxswains of small craft) are barely competent sailors. By doctrine, they are supposed to provide security for US Army Logistics Over the Shore operations. We plan on doing that ourselves, because in the Chesapeake Bay it's 50/50 they will get there on time. I 100% believe that navy officer that was violating the Code of Conduct: Those tool's got lost, and were picked up by the Iranian's before they could figure it out. It's not a conspiracy, it's lowest common denominator boat handling. We (the Army) normally know our position to within .5 NM or so. We train, and routinely use, GPS, RDF, visual, and celestial navigation. My experience with small (read less than 300 or so ft) Navy boats, is that if it isn't on their commercial grade chartplotter, they don't know it.
Hell they couldn't even be bothered to get their uniforms on before being captured.
Larry's a sailor (of sailboats, not talking submarines here) so he'll probably understand this.
When I was still in high school, my uncle's boss owned a gorgeous, wood, German-made 40-foot yawl that he sailed out of a private yacht club located on Long Island Sound (that puddle between Connecticut and New York). The old man was getting too old to handle the boat himself, and his wife was too old to help, so he hired my cousin as crew for a couple of years. When my cousin moved on to bigger and better (paying) things, I was offered the job. Hmmm ... a chance to sail on the most beautiful boat I had ever seen, AND get paid for it? Yeah, I really struggled with that decision.
If you want to fire up Google maps, look up Stonington, Connecticut. We overnighted in Stonington on one jaunt, and the next morning we set off for Block Island. It was a good day, with a fair breeze, and the sail should have taken us (IIRC) a couple of hours. We sailed, and we sailed ... and we sailed, and we sailed some more ... and we weren't seeing any land. Skipper's wife had made the trip enough times that she knew we should'a been there by now. Finally, she gave me a hand signal to come down into the main cabin. She told me in no uncertain terms that she was sure her husband had messed up his navigating, and she asked me to figure out where we were, and how to get where we were going.
Back then, we didn't have GPS. Loran had been invented, but sailboats our size didn't use it. Basically, we had charts, a tide chart, a compass, and our heads. I knew what course the skipper had been steering, so I dug out the chart and the tide table, laid out a course and an estimated speed -- and I calculated that we were just over the horizon and due west from where we wanted to be, and if we kept going for about ten days we should be in Barcelona. So I worked out a new course, went back topsides and gave it to the missus, and she told her husband to make a left turn and steer the course I had worked out. He protested that he knew how to navigate, and we just needed to sail a bit longer. She told him to turn left.
We turned left, and we made harbor in about 45 minutes. (Yes, I know ... "port," not "left.")
Another time I made it the full length of Fisher's Island Sound (you'll find it just outside of Stonington Harbor) in a pea soup fog, dead reckoning from one buoy to the next.
The point being that navigation isn't all that difficult, IF you pay attention to what you're doing. With GPS, there's really no excuse for getting so lost you stray into enemy territory.