NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Book suggestion, please.
From: UNK
Date: 2004 Apr 30, 10:00 -0400
From: UNK
Date: 2004 Apr 30, 10:00 -0400
On Friday, April 30, 2004 8:33 AM Georgeasked: > Here's a request for advice from listmembers about a suitable book. > > An intelligent geographer finds himself in the position of editing for > publication a number of logs of sailing-vessel voyages of the early 19th > century (pre-Sumner). > > He lacks the background of small-boat navigation that so many of us on this > list enjoy, and admits to knowing little about navigation generally. Yet > for this editing, he finds that he needs to learn something about the > basics of navigation, coastal, DR, and celestial. > > He and I are arranging some sort of short crash-course between us, in the > Summer. But before then, I would like to recommend to him a book, or two, > (or website perhaps) to help him to prepare to understand the background. > Damned if I can think of what the best text might be for that job. Any > suggestions? I have always recommended George Mixter's _Primer of Navigation_ as a good starting point for learning and understanding coastal and celestial navigation. It's back in print, with added chapters on current electronics, but the foundation is still piloting, dead reckoning, and celestial (with solutions by HO 211/Ageton in the older editions, adding HO 229 & 249 examples in later eds). Older editions are omnipresent on eBay and would serve him just as well as the current one. Indeed, the 1940's editions have at least some discussion of the "old" navigation (meridian and time sights). However, your friend's focus would be on the nature of pilotage, DR, and especially the mind-set of using sights, bearings, soundings, etc., to regularly refine a necessarily inexact notion of where one is. More specifically, Mixter, Dutton, Bowditch, and others all contain a chapter that walks the reader through a day's work, usually pilotage out of a harbor, taking departure, then on to AM/PM stars and sun lines. If your friend could study one or more of these navigational days, he would get closer to the navigator's mind-set. -- Peter