Sextant
Sven,
I live on the western coast of Florida, and about 25 years ago a friend gave me a Davis Instruments plastic sextant. They came in a couple of grades back then, and I believe that the one I was given was the better or the two.
I had read Wm. Buckley's "Atlantic High" wherein he made much of the efficacy of knowing how to use a sextant. He made it sound easy. I found out that it was anything but. I bought the requisite books (H.O. 229 and some others). I got some pads whereon one could enter the calculations in proper sequence. This "learning" process went on somewhat endlessly over several months. The errors I made were laughably stupid. Finally, I got out on the beach here, pointed my sextant at the sun, got it down to the horizon and recorded the precise time. My watch was coordinated with Naval Observatory Time. Of course, I knew exactly where I was when I took that sight.
Then I went home and worked out an LOP. No matter how much I tried, the best I could do was to get an LOP that was 30 miles from where I knew I had been when I took the sight. The next day I went down to my marine equipment store and bought a Loran C. I knew in my heart of hearts that there were some things I was never going to be able to do. Finding out where I was with a sextant was tops on that list. Still is.
The Loran has given way to a GPS. I started small. I have jumped up a couple of notches since. I have a hard-wired Garmin on board my E-27. And I have a couple of other Garmin 478s, which are light years ahead of the hard-wired unit.
Point of fact, the technology today obviates sextant use, in my opinion. The information you get from a GPS unit is accurate, timely and a cinch to acquire. With all the other ancillary information you also get--SOG, ETA, ETE, waypoints, courses to follow--there seems to be no reason to bother with all the complexities that the use of a sextant entail. I say this because I believe it and because I miserably failed to acquire the skills necessary to operate a sextant with any degree of accuracy. But I tried.
As a strange aside, I used to live in New Hampshire, in a small town in the southwestern part of the state. It was called Fitzwilliam, a Currier & Ives type of village with nearby granite quarries and a latticeworks of stone walls at every house. The house I lived in--a lovely manse owned by my stepfather--had open-beamed ceilings, fireplaces upstairs and down, five bedrooms, a tennis court, and lovely amenities throughout. My stepfather, a retired executive from Pacific Mills, later Burlington Industries, bought the house from a family from Salem, Massachusetts. This had been a summer retreat for them. The former owners' name was Bowditch...as in Nathaniel Bowditch.
Good luck. I never had much.
Morgan Stinemetz