Demystifying celestial navigation

IN THE DAYS before GPS, navigators were much sought-after on deep-sea racing yachts. Many thought themselves to be mighty fine fellows, and strutted around like minor royalty with their charts and sextant boxes tucked under their arms. They maintained a high hedge of mystique around the art of celestial navigation.

Then, in 1950, along came a woman called Mary Blewitt who mowed down their hedges and called their bluff. She wrote a modest 60-page book called Celestial Navigation for Yachtsmen that showed everyone how to find their position at sea with no more math than a few simple additions and subtractions.

That book is still in print but I expect sales are down now. There’s not much call for celestial navigation when you can get your position in an instant by pushing a button on a GPS receiver.

But if you want to experience the sheer pleasure and profound satisfaction of handling a precision instrument to measure the sun and the stars and plot your position on the chart like centuries of seamen before you, clutch Mary Blewitt to your heart. Then you, too, will be entitled to strut your stuff.

Incidentally,  you can practice taking sights with your sextant at home by shooting the sun in a tray of old engine oil or an artificial horizon.

Today’s Thought

There is no greater disloyalty to the great pioneers of human progress than to refuse to budge an inch from where they stood.

— Dean W. R. Inge.

Tailpiece

“Excuse me waiter, how long how you been working here?”
“Only about a week, sir.”
“Oh, you can’t be the one who took my order, then.”

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)

The Sheep talks back

IF YOU’VE READ Capt. Joshua Slocum’s account of his voyage around the world, you’ll surely remember how the “Pilot of the Pinta” came to Slocum’s rescue when he was incapacitated from food poisoning.

People who sail small boats across oceans say you hear voices like that when you’ve become totally exhausted. But you don’t have to be totally exhausted. Just partially will do. Ask Felix Knauth, of Houston, Texas.

Felix wrote to me the other day with an anecdote that reminded me immediately of Capt. Slocum. Here are his words:

“From 1987 to 1997 I owned The Black Sheep, a Tom Gillmer Aries 32 that I rescued from a slow death in Sausalito. She was a beautiful design but poorly constructed in Taiwan, so she usually sailed below her capability (to my dismay).

“Anyhow, in 1992 I was singlehanding off Nova Scotia; dark was coming on; the weather was getting nasty; I was more than a bit fearful—and frustrated because I could not find a slant that she liked.

“Wind—I guess maybe 20 plus; waves, short and quick and choppy. She would try to go straight but the waves kept slamming into either quarter, pushing her stern off course. I sat there in the cockpit trying this and that but the stiff chop seemed to be in charge.

“ ‘Aha,’ I thought, ‘let’s try trailing a long loop of warp.’ I went below and pulled 300 feet of spare anchor rode into the cockpit, hard-laid 3/4-inch nylon; tied two ends together; shortened up my tether; took a deep breath, stood up facing aft, and threw the tied ends over the Monitor vane. I let it out and tied if off port and starboard.

“Her response was immediate—it was like I had put her on rails, straight and easy at last.

“Now here’s the part that in the clear light of days later may not actually have happened, but at the time I could have sworn to it. A calm, pleasant voice said: ‘Well, good work, Felix, but it did take you a while. Now go below, make cocoa, and get some rest.’

“I did just that, feeling terrific. I guess The Sheep and I had reached a rapprochement—neither one of us was going to get the other into trouble.”

Today’s Thought
How nice the human voice is when it isn’t singing.
— Rudolf Bing

Tailpiece
Then there was the kangaroo that went to see the psychiatrist.
“You’ve gotta help me, doc,” he said, “I don’t feel jumpy any more.”