Paul Heiney The fine art of navigating by sight of the sun with a sextant may have become somewhat redundant aboard, but the joy and satisfaction it brings remains a thing of wonder
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hall I sell my old sextant, or not? It has hardly had a busy life since I brought it back from the Atlantic. It’s now a relic of a great adventure so time for someone else to love and cherish it, swing its mirrors to the sun and squint in frustration at the tiny degree markings engraved in brass. I was thinking of ebay but I find their website infuriating. Everything is predictive and demands you enter something in the box marked ‘size’ with options from S to XL. What do they think it is? A t-shirt? Also, when selling a sextant do not to pause after entering the first three letters - the predictions are not for those of a nervous disposition. Ebay asks for a full description, naturally, but there is no option to describe the salty scent which emerges when you open its mahogany box, which is part of its appeal to me. And how do I value a faded piece of paper which carries an oath sworn by its German maker who writes in a reassuringly precise copperplate hand and testifies, ‘I promise you herewith, that this precision instrument has been assembled by me according to all the rules of sextant construction... and is free from errors.’ No get-out clauses in there; how one craves such a wide-ranging promise on those electronic marvels we stuff our boats with these days. But is a sextant of any use, other than as an ornament, or possibly scrap value given the weight of brass in it? I had an old friend who had been a master navigator in the 1960s and was responsible for many ocean racing victories. On one of his own voyages across the Atlantic, the first in which he had taken a newly-invented GPS, he wrote, ‘...out of habit I took out the GPS at noon and took a fix and marked it on the chart. Then I looked across to the sextant and realised it was now no more than a piece of antique furniture. Perhaps the ebay ‘Household Fixtures’ page is where I should be heading’. He was right, up to a point, about sextants being yesterday’s news. There is no longer any excuse for getting lost and having to resort to one. I once counted up how many GPS devices I have on board and it came
to around 10 - each crew has one on their phone, the plotter has one, the EPRIB, the spare in the grab bag, and on it goes. There’s more data swilling around a boat these days than water in the bilge. But to consider a sextant as merely a navigation device is to miss the point. On a long trip with lengthy periods alone, I found it therapeutic to the point where it became somewhat addictive. I wonder if ebay would let me list it as medicine? Taking a sight grew into a daily routine, which is vital to preserve the sanity when ocean sailing becomes tedious at times. I’d take a noon sight for latitude, and greatly look forward to it, then compare it with the GPS, and if they were within hair’s breadth the mood lifted. If, as more often happened, sextant and GPS were half a continent apart, gloom descended. But that’s the reason sextant navigation is so captivating - it’s so damned hard to get it right. Like doing a tricky crossword, or Sudoku, one slip and you’re wasting your time. Looking at the plotter, on the other hand, is so undemanding that it’s almost achievable in your sleep, and where’s the fun in that? And just for the record, I didn’t use a calculator or a sight reduction app. I had a proper almanac and tables, and a watch as chronometer, and flicked the pages of densely printed numbers, figures dancing before my eyes as the boat rocked. Apart from a pencil, the next most useful item was the rubber eraser with which I endlessly scraped away when the numbers didn’t add up and the resulting position lines put me somewhere off Casablanca when I was north of the Falkland Islands. But that’s part of the fun. Time can hang heavy on long voyages and sextant navigation can consume huge tracts of it, far better than Netflix when it comes to getting through a long and lonely evening. I started to remember all this as I struggled away with the ebay website. I could describe the sextant in all its glory but nowhere does ebay allow you to describe the companionship, or the satisfaction it is capable of bringing. Monetary value is the only thing ebay is interested in. So I don’ t think I’ ll sell it, not yet. In part because that damned website is simply too difficult to navigate.
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DECEMBER 2021 Sailing Today with Yachts & Yachting
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ILLUSTRATION: CLAIRE WOOD
‘But is a sextant of any use, other than as an ornament, or possibly scrap value given the weight of brass in it?’
