Posted by Tom Napier on December 06, 2013 at 15:57:13 user Didymus.
In Reply to: Re: AR taught me to sail posted by Peter Ceresole on December 06, 2013 at 14:59:41:
"I did read about people who made a good living from it and had a high success rate."
Not to wander too far from AR, but the success of dowsing seems to depend on a misapprehension amongst dowsers and their employers about the distribution of underground water. The dowsing model is that water travels in narrow underground streams which one's well must hit dead on or be dry. That is, drilling a matter of inches away from the right spot will yield nothing.
In real life, water occurs in large areas of permeable soil. A well will yield water almost anywhere a dowser might indicate. All he has to do is to pick likely terrain. I, and all my neighbors, have wells on our property. Which is more likely, that each lot has its own underground stream which the well happens to have hit, or that the whole area is underlaid with an aquifer?