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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Shall I sell my old sextant, or not? It has hardly had a busy life since I brought it back from the Atlantic. It’s 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. now a relic of a great adventure But to consider a sextant as merely so time for someone else to a navigation device is to miss the love and cherish it, swing its point. On a long trip with lengthy mirrors to the sun and squint in periods alone, I found it therapeutic frustration at the tiny degree to the point where it became markings engraved in brass. somewhat addictive. I wonder if

I was thinking of ebay but I ebay would let me list it as medicine? find their website infuriating. Taking a sight grew into a daily

Everything is predictive and routine, which is vital to preserve the demands you enter something sanity when ocean sailing becomes in the box marked ‘size’ with tedious at times. I’d take a noon options from S to XL. What do sight for latitude, and greatly look they think it is? A t-shirt? Also, forward to it, then compare it with when selling a sextant do not to the GPS, and if they were within pause after entering the first three hair’s breadth the mood lifted. If, letters - the predictions are not for those of a nervous disposition. ‘But is a sextant of any use, as more often happened, sextant and GPS were half a continent

Ebay asks for a full description, naturally, but there is no option other than as an ornament, apart, gloom descended. But that’s the reason sextant navigation is so to describe the salty scent which or possibly scrap value given captivating - it’s so damned hard emerges when you open its mahogany box, which is part of its the weight of brass in it?’ to get it right. Like doing a tricky crossword, or Sudoku, one slip and appeal to me. And how do I value you’re wasting your time. Looking a faded piece of paper which carries an oath sworn by at the plotter, on the other hand, is so undemanding its German maker who writes in a reassuringly precise that it’s almost achievable in your sleep, and where’s copperplate hand and testifies, ‘I promise you herewith, the fun in that? And just for the record, I didn’t use that this precision instrument has been assembled by a calculator or a sight reduction app. I had a proper me according to all the rules of sextant construction... almanac and tables, and a watch as chronometer, and and is free from errors.’ No get-out clauses in there; flicked the pages of densely printed numbers, figures how one craves such a wide-ranging promise on those dancing before my eyes as the boat rocked. Apart from a electronic marvels we stuff our boats with these days. pencil, the next most useful item was the rubber eraser

But is a sextant of any use, other than as an ornament, with which I endlessly scraped away when the numbers or possibly scrap value given the weight of brass in it? I didn’t add up and the resulting position lines put me had an old friend who had been a master navigator in somewhere off Casablanca when I was north of the the 1960s and was responsible for many ocean racing Falkland Islands. But that’s part of the fun. Time can victories. On one of his own voyages across the Atlantic, hang heavy on long voyages and sextant navigation can the first in which he had taken a newly-invented GPS, consume huge tracts of it, far better than Netflix when he wrote, ‘...out of habit I took out the GPS at noon and it comes to getting through a long and lonely evening. took a fix and marked it on the chart. Then I looked I started to remember all this as I struggled away across to the sextant and realised it was now no more with the ebay website. I could describe the sextant than a piece of antique furniture. Perhaps the ebay in all its glory but nowhere does ebay allow you

‘Household Fixtures’ page is where I should be heading’. to describe the companionship, or the satisfaction

He was right, up to a point, about sextants being it is capable of bringing. Monetary value is the yesterday’s news. There is no longer any excuse for only thing ebay is interested in. So I don’ t think getting lost and having to resort to one. I once counted I’ ll sell it, not yet. In part because that damned up how many GPS devices I have on board and it came website is simply too difficult to navigate.

ILLUSTRATION: CLAIRE WOOD