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Hi guys,

Having just delivered a ULDB 33' from Newport Beach, California to Honolulu,
Hawaii I had an interesting little experience with the celestial.   During
this delivery I intended to do some serious improvement in my skills with
twilight stars (and indentification) and with calculator techniques which
I've hardly ever used.

I've always been an advocate of Tables and blank paper, no forms (let's not
re-open that debate!) and sure enough the first casualty of the trip was the
TI calculator with brand new battery.   It was flipping funny numbers and I
ended up sending it swimming, darn it.

Back to the traditional tables and paper.

Then the cloud cover didn't cooperate a whole lot either but I managed a
couple of high points, anyway.   My 'new' sextant, a 3/4 size Simex, turned
out very reliable fixes and was easier than I thought it would be.   For
open ocean I was pretty pleased.  All my fixes came out within 5nm of actual
position, usually  3nm, and in one case 1nm!*

How do I know?   GPS!  :-)

Dave Boatman
LAKA/Honolulu
dboat@lava.net




*....though the 1nm error was surely do to random chance (SOME of them are
going to be closer and some further).

**   Using H.O. 249 tables and Yachtsman's Almanac

***  Sure I used a GPS, but I was ready for it to follow the path of the
calculator.....electronics being what           they are.

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