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Peter-
 

 True, very true. The GPS depends on a long chain of technology, but the 
sextant depends on one highly trained user. Often there will be only one 
person on a boat who knows how to use the sextant, and if that one person is 
incapacitated for any reason (eye damage, seasickness, concussion, overboard) 
then the sextant is probably going to be useless junk, just like a 
salt-water-soggy GPS.

 The advantage to GPS is that any reasonably intelligent human (and probably a 
number of chimps) can figure out how to press the ON button, at which 
point they will have sufficient navigational data to make some progress in 
the right direction--immmediately and surely, without waiting for a three-day 
storm to clear.

 The tools (sextant and GPS) are very different, and each has different 
vulnerabilities. But in this day and age I think we must consider the sextant 
to be a pursuit of intellectual exercise and curiousity--not a superior 
navigational instrument.

 The fools who run aground with a GPS would have simply died lost at sea with 
a sextant. No technology can overcome a properly motivated user. [sic]

   

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