NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Rafael C. Caruso
Date: 2026 Oct 16, 14:12 -0700
Frank Reed has proposed a very useful rule to distinguish a real sextant from a fake approximately shaped like a sextant. It is the following (I'm paraphrasing): “If it's shiny, it's fake”. I recently visited the Weems &Plath website to buy a pair of dividers. Only out of curiosity, as I have no interest in purchasing another sextant, I looked at their sextants listing. There I saw what is apparently the proverbial “exception that proves the rule”: the Tamaya golden Sextant, which they claim is a fully functional gold-plated instrument. The listed price is positively mind-boggling: US$ 19,710.99. In my opinion, this suggests that the target prospective owner seems to be a person with more wealth than intelligence, and an inordinate fondness for gilded objects.
Best, Rafael C
