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    Re: Help needed with old sextant readings
    From: Daniel McShane
    Date: 2015 Feb 28, 19:21 -0800

    Posting here also so maybe you will see one of them: This does not look like navigation info. Everything is steadily counting upward. Depending on the persons education, background, and how they use periods and commas, this looks more like engineering logs. The fact that there is no time recorded suggests that it was roughly the same time each day and a regular thing the log keeper or notetaker would do. Time would always be recorded for a sextant sight so the sight reduction could be worked out. Whatever they were writing down was every week on a thursday except the last entry which was on a Saturday. Waiting 7 to 9 days to take sextant sights would be almost impossible for a seasoned sailor to do. It appears that everything is supposed to be followed by the inches symbol, as the last entry in each line has it. The VA has it on the 29 February entry whereas it did not in the previous entries. This almost looks as if the vessel was tied up or anchored for several weeks from 30 January 1964 to 29 February 1964 (perhaps celebrating the leap year somewhere warm) and the person was checking on it once a week, sounding bilges and tanks or something. After the readings on February 20 the pumps were run and the next set of readings is lower. This could also be a combination of bearings and depths like in an anchor log but, again, time is not listed so it is probably not used for navigation. This is just a wild guess but with no other info it is hard to narrow down what it would be in a sailboat.  If you figure it out, please let us know.

       
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