NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Greg Rudzinski
Date: 2013 Nov 25, 10:19 -0800
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Callahan
There are lots of similarities between Our Man and Steven Callahan who spent 76 days adrift in a liferaft.
Re: Nautical matters in "All is Lost"
From: Greg Rudzinski
Date: 2013 Nov 25, 09:44 -0800
Knowing where you are while adrift in a raft might seem pointless but it is important to know when in a traffic lane such as a great circle route between the Malacca straits and South Africa. Having a waterproof handheld VHF radio would have given him a much better chance of rescue when ships were in sight. There was no sign of an EPIRB which seems to date the period to pre GPS.
Greg Rudzinski
Nautical matters in "All is Lost"
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2013 Nov 25, 08:54 -0800
There are some interesting points in the comments on this blog, both positive and negative:
http://www.oldsaltblog.com/2013/10/lost-robert-redford-solo-sailor-review/
Note: there are many 'spoilers' in the comments at that site and I've got a few small spoilers that follow here...
Dave's message earlier about a sextant as a gift for the wealthy got me looking for other recent references to the film and the sextant in it. I found several reviews that describe a sextant as 'expensive'. Really?? Compared to what? One subtlety in the film that I didn't mention last time which someone highlighted in a review: the sextant is apparently presented as a gift from someone close to "our man". There's a card in the case which he looks at briefly but sets aside poignantly without opening.
A comment on the blog above says that "our man" has a Nautical Almanac but then asks, 'where are the sight reduction tables'? So I guess that commenter hasn't actually looked at a Nautical Almanac since the 1980s. :) Of course, it's more likely that "our man" limited himself to latitude by Noon Sun or possibly lat/lon by near-noon Sun. In 'reality', the celestial navigation he's doing is really only helping his morale in any case. He's adrift in a lifeboat in the period when we see him using the sextant.
-FER
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