Joe, I also used a sextant on a transatlantic sail with my father in 1972, from Annapolis to the Azores in a 43' Sparkman-Stevens yawl. We did have the then-current LORAN, which required superimposing traces on an oscilloscope from the two stations. That worked until we were about 100 miles into the Atlantic, and gave me a couple of days to practice with the sextant, having never had the opportunity to try it except with an artificial horizon. We did only sunsights (the math for the moon sights seemed very complicated, and I had trouble identifying the stars) and restricted them to local apparent noon (gives you latitude with no need for time) and when the sun was due east or west (longitude, but you do need the time). My father had an Accutron (remember? with the tuning fork?) watch and we also had a SSB radio and talked nearly daily with our ham radio club in Bethesda, MD. They would tune in WWV so we could check his watch, which was more accurate than my sunsights. I was very surprised that with little practice it was fairly easy to get fixes that agreed within about a mile to the LORAN, and that was adequate to get us first to Bermuda and then to the Azores. As you mention, once we got within 20 miles or so, we could use the radio beacon to get a crude direction to our destination.
As pointed out by an earlier poster, it was quite common in Norway (and maybe Britain?) before accurate time pieces were invented to sail up or down the coast until reaching the latitude of your destination and then just sailing due east, keeping the latitude constant. Eric Frank Cat'sPaw > From: "Della Barba, Joe" <[email protected]> > To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> > Subject: Re: Stus-List Sextant > Message-ID: > <1073606396712942aee54d9a960e45a7185a036...@hq-mb-07.ba.ad.ssa.gov> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" > > We used a sextant to find Bermuda in 1980 and it was a major PITA. In rough > seas on a small boat getting any accuracy beyond maybe +/- 15 miles is doing > very well. Just taking the sight and not falling overboard or dropping the > sextant was an accomplishment. We ended up running a latitude line north of > the island until we picked up the radio beacon on the RDF and followed that > in. > > Joe Della Barba > Coquina _______________________________________________ This List is provided by the C&C Photo Album http://www.cncphotoalbum.com [email protected]
