NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Ed Popko
Date: 2015 Mar 20, 04:44 -0700
Ocean Navigator (ON) magazine readers, help me if you remember.
Many years ago (1980-early 90s), ON ran a regular Celestial Navigation column as well as a monthly Nav Problem by authors David Berson, Cameron Bright, Greg Walsh, Tad Michel and others. They were wonderful. Simple, well illustrated, and bit sized ways to learn Celestial Navigation.
There was a wonderful Mid-March Equinox story about New Bedford ship (?) heading to Bristol (?).
The drift of the story, as best I can remember, is after a few weeks of voyaging, temperatures began to drop and sea fog became more common. Finally, the ship was beset in fog so dense it was unsafe to continue sailing so the ship drops sails and waits for the weather to improve. To everyone's astonishment, out of the fog rows an old man and young kid. They are friendly and quickly taken aboard but no one can understand what they are saying (they spoke Norwegian). The crew follows their direction and they dock at high latitude Norwegian port considerably further north than their intended destination in England.
The article was about the LAN error they made, the forgot to reverse the declination sign of the Sun at the Equinox and each day's LAN calculation put them further off course.
Do any of you remember this example?