Staying on course

One in an occasional series on people who do interesting or challenging jobs.

MARION - Let's get all the bad jokes about what Ray Andrews does for a living out of the way: He's got a magnetic personality. He's found his direction in life. He can really tell you where to go.

Or, as Andrews himself notes, "I spend my life going in circles."

Andrews, of Mattapoisett, is a compass adjuster, one of about 125 full-time compass adjusters nationwide. He is well aware of the unusual nature of his job, and relishes it.

He has been at it for 22 years, and while the bulk of his work is local, he also adjusts boat compasses as far away as the Pacific Ocean, doing work for the United States Military Sealift Command tuning the compasses on oil tankers, ammunition ships, and hospital vessels. That part of his business has picked up since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, he said.

But this day, Andrews is paying a house call to the Tabor Boy, a 92-foot sloop that is the training vessel for Tabor Academy students at the seaside prep school in this affluent little town. The ship, built in 1914, had just had a major overhaul and as a result of welding aboard the ship, the magnetic field had been rearranged.

Enter Andrews. His mission is simple enough: Make the compass read the way it's supposed to read, with zero deviation. But to hear him explain how that is done is, for the uninitiated, to delve into mind-numbing technical detail.

One might think that in this high-tech age of GPS, a compass is no longer an essential tool of navigation. Wrong.

"If a compass is not adjusted properly," said Andrews, moving a pair of small magnetic bars up and down near the Tabor Boy's glass-domed compass to get a true reading, "a ship's autopilot can't hold a steady course."

The Tabor Boy's compass is a beauty, the largest spherical dome compass made by the Danforth company, with an 8-inch radius. It is housed in a solid brass base with bronze brackets extending from either side, each holding up two 4 1/2-inch iron balls known as "quadrantal spheres," which help stabilize the magnetic field. The compass's thick glass has a slight oil coating on the inside for ultraviolet protection, and it lends the glass a smoky look.

Tabor Boy's captain, James E. Geil, steered the boat in outer Sippican Harbor north, then circled south at Andrews's instruction. As the boat moved through the water, Andrews moved a small magnetic bar up and down, synchronizing its placement with the dead-on accurate reading of the electronic gyroscopic compass he carries with him, to get a vessel's true directional heading. When the gyro marked dead-on north, Andrews taped the magnetic bar to the wood a couple of feet below the compass, to be permanently affixed later.

Andrews then repeated the maneuver as the Tabor Boy went east to west, and west to east - moving the magnets closer or farther away from the compass until the magnetic field is stabilized, and the Tabor Boy compass has zero deviation.

"I hate to tell you how simple compass adjusting is," Andrews said, smiling. "You just keep moving the magnets until you create the magnetic field you want."

Steel boats can wreak havoc with a magnetic field of a ship, he said, adding, "Every time you weld on a ship - every bolt has a magnetic fingerprint, it leaves a residual magnetic field."

Over time, it can knock the compass out of whack. When Andrews started his business in 1984, of the roughly 250 fishing boats in New Bedford Harbor, 200 were steel, 50 were wood. Now, he said, there are just three wood ships left and the rest a mix of steel, fiberglass, and aluminum.

Andrews - a former yacht captain who is also a selectman in Mattapoisett - said that of the roughly 200 vessels he tunes up a year, 50 are recreational vessels, and the rest government or commercial.

The US Coast Guard recommends steel boats get their compasses adjusted every two years, and the rest every five. The commercial industry is very good about keeping up those standards, he said. But more and more mariners are relying on GPS systems, being less diligent about the compass. That puts them at risk, says Jack Braitmayer, a Tabor Boy trustee who was aboard the day Andrews paid his visit.

Boats need a redundant system to be safe, he says. "You need a belt-and-suspender system. . . . Everything has a back-up."

"It's good to have all these electronics," said Braitmayer, pointing to the Tabor Boy's advanced system, "but if it all goes down, you're in the soup."

So does Andrews ever have to stop to ask for directions? "No, never," he says with a smile. "And it really aggravates my wife."

Paul E. Kandarian can be reached at kandarian@globe.com. Feel free to contact him with ideas about other interesting or unusual jobs.