> Well, isn't your real beef with incompetent surveyors?
Your summation is probably a more accurate assessment of the situation.
However, I find the same type of poorly re-written "new" description so often that I just wish those guys would leave a perfectly fine description alone.
I had a conversation on this subject with a fellow surveyor at the state organization's annual golf and picnic this past weekend.
He was discussing a recent description he was trying to re-trace. The original surveyor had followed an old abandoned road bed without even calling out the old road bed. Such a simple phrase as "thence with the center of the abandoned {name of road} bed {bearing and distance}...", sure makes for a much clearer intent than only having N45-15-26W, 125.27'.
A property owner can most likely say - there is the old road bed, that is my line. They may not understand a bearing and distance only.
> What astounds me is that there is software to write legal descriptions. Each and every word on legals that I write are unique to the particular sitation and I take a lot of time to ensure that I carry the proper intent forward.
That's always been my view of descriptions and description writing software as well. The first versions started coming out a few years before I earned my 1st license, but I had already been writing descriptions for some time under the direction of other surveyors.
The bearings and distances are, more often than not, less important than where they are coming from and where they are going to.
I haven't used any of the description writing programs, so I don't know, are they able to extract from one's CAD file that a set of courses is "along the northerly right of way of County Road #12", or that a course leads to "a 1 inch galvanized iron pipe with brass cap marked ______", or if the next course is "thence leaving the westerly bank of the Sacramento River"?
Maybe, but I'd be very surprised.