Celestial Navigation? Forget it!

[Jeff_H]

While I agree with you about the importance of celestial navigation, I would suspect that a lightning stike would wipe out the electical chronometer needed for accurate celestrial navigation. No one seems to even make wind up chronomters anymore and I could not even find anyone willing to rebuild my wind up chronometer when it died.

Jeff

[928frenzy]

I very seriously doubt that any of my wrist watch chronometers (I have more than one, and at least one of them is a wind-up) will be adversely affected by a lighting strike unless I''m hit by the bolt. If so, I''ll have much more to worry about than just knowing where I am. :^(

~ Happy sails to you ~ _/) ~

[sailnaway]

OK here I go telling no lie about my first time GPS laid back dumb ass this is so easy that shoal aint suppose to be their trip.
I took off from Clearwater Florida heading to Panama City Florida. Hit the Horn Missel test range just south east of Panama City and wanted to get close to shore to make a celluar call.The first line tells it all I was about five miles east of where I was suppose to be why I have not quite figured out for sure. I say the glitch was the satalite over that range is giving a false signal to GPS that is not military kind of like TAF if your flying it is their but you can not use it I am not sure but I did go aground not a bad one but it could have been.
I will never rely on electronics as my navigation ever again only as a back up. I took a celectial navigation course years back and need to brush up. I am sure they have simplified the formula a little bit since then.

[jerryrlitton]

I hear alot said about2 or r GPS''s on board and batteries are all over the place, but what about that lightning strike that takes out all your electronics? I am going to learn use a sextant. Besides you may win a bar bet or 2 with it.
j

[ccboston]

I agree that this is a dumb argument.

Consider the following three statements:

1) Celestial navigation is obsolete.

2) Celestial navigation has been replaced by more effective technology that is entirely reliable enough to not require CN as a backup.

3) Commerical shipping and the world''s navies do not use CN any more.


Now repeat those three sentences, substituting "sail" for "celestial navigation". They remain equally true, but I don''t see anyone on here using that as an argument to quit sailing.

[sailingdog]

One other thing about sextants, is that they can be very useful for coastal navigation as well as bluewater navigation. A sextant can give you the distance from shore if you have an object of known height or width.

Only an idiot would go offshore without multiple methods of navigation. Electronics are known to fail—your batteries could fail, the circuit boards could get corroded, the boat could get hit by lightning. Someone could drop it over the side or step on it.

Paper charts are a good backup to electronic charts, but whenver you're near land, either can have problems with accuracy.

Sextants are a good backup to GPS. Using both can give you a greater sense of security than either alone.

By the way, most of the satellites in the GPS system are due for replacement and may fail at any time, as they are past their designed lifespan. Satellite failures are definitely a possibility—remember the Hughes IV satellite that failed about six years ago and took out most of the pager services in the United States.

[timetasell]

well,.....you make an extremely strong case regardless of the reasons one would go to the expence and time and trouble of cs when one can just turn on the gps and then move on to more important( Fun perhaps) things one does while at sea. However,....there is one instance you may have overlooked and that is this. I am new to the idea of sailing but have an overpowering desire to make some very bold moves toward it. One of the things that interest me is the "art of navigation" in which cs is a huge part of. Its more of an interest to me to know how to find my bearings as close as possible with all nav equipment. However,....for the funtional reasons I would do the same....whip out the garmin and move on to more fun things to do........thanks for your post,....Mark

[sailnaway]

South of Apalachicola Florida is the Horn Air force towers. This area is a missile test range which you can pass through if coming from the south west coast of Florida heading to Panama City. I have twice had my GPS give me a false reading that once put me miles east of St Andrews Bay but said I was at St Andrews. I also had that area affect my cell phone and it would not get a signal for five hours then like magic it came back and so did the GPS but it took it several hours to get on track. I almost went aground on St Joseph shoal which is a killer. I have a degree in celestial navigation and have not seen my sextant in years "for shame".
Hell I don't even know if HO249 still works.

[Tea-Rex]

in my opinion navigating with GPS or sextant isn't the actual question.
the danger i see is people not learning anymore to navigate. instead they only learn how to feed their box and let it do it for them.
over time the procedures for celestial navigation have gotten saveguards build in that show pretty fast when there's something wrong with a fix. it seems few people ever question their GPS position.

[Faith of Holland]

We too have a sextant onboard and use it little. We've travelled halfway around the world using $200 handheld gps's. We only pull out the old $1,500 (you may wish to find a different supplier) sextant, which we happened to find before our voyage started three years ago, new, for under $500; when we want to exercise our brains and watch the magnificent offshore night sky.
What I find truly amazing on reading your post is that people are still sinking a bunch of money into these ancient vessels we call boats, when the technology exists to create the same virtual experience in front of the computer screen. I suppose there will always be people who just can't let the past be the past, and I hope I will always be one of those people.
On the practical side, the sextant requires three links in the chain: me, the stars, and the optics. It kind of boggles the mind to think of how many links there are in the gps system, and worse, how many vulnerabilities might exist there. Its worked so far for us, and it will probably continue to work, but I just don't care to rely on it completely.