On a past Celebrity Cruise one of the bridge officers was not only trained to navigate, he was also a hobbiest lover of all things navigation. One night on the cruise we gathered on the uppermost deck of the ship, they turned off what lights they could and then he gave a presentation on navigation using the stars. It was surprising that he was able to use a standard laser pointer to pinpoint what body he was talking about as he told us how ships had historically navigated. It was the best experience we have had on a cruise. If Celebrity isn't doing that on every cruise, they should.
I’m a bit of an old salt as well and thoroughly enjoyed learning to use a sextant when I was young. I had one on board my sailboat and navigated between San Francisco and Hawaii with it. This was back in the early seventies before GPS or reliable loran so a sextant was a necessity. I miss those days.
Looks a lot more complicated than those used in the 1500-1600 coming to Virginia! I really liked using the GPS much more! Thanks for another great video. Hi to Bug!
I had to take navigation class to sail on my uncle’s boat but I had a bigger deal that not everyone we sailed with knew how to swim which to me was also a skill on should have. 😂 there were many stories about the dinghy and oars mishaps 😂
You need the object, the horizon, and time for all but Polaris and maybe noon sun. :-) Yes I'm being a smarty. The creation of accurate time pieces was so important to navigation I don't think it should be left out. When you really get down to the basics a sextant is used for measuring angles. I'll bey you learned to use it horizontally to get accurate angles between two objects on land too. Yes navigation was a hobby for many years. David
