NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Michael Bradley
Date: 2017 Jan 23, 12:05 -0800
David
Best of luck staggering up the gangway ...... but two more suggestions .....
Firstly. no-one has yet explicitly mentioned Traverse Tables, although they do appear in a lot of the fat books. Take some and use them. If you don't have any to hand, I can provide them in home brew spreadsheet form. One big difference between an ocean passage using astro, and dabbling with astro a day at a time, is the problem of running up yesterday's latest sight to cross with this morning's earliest sight. On a container ship at 20 plus knots you'll have covered a lot of ocean overnight. One easy way of dealing with it is to calculate the new Estimated Position from the last Observed Position plus the data from the ship's log ( with permission ) using Traverse Tables. If you've never tried it before, have a wee practice before you go on board. Then again, you could cheat by getting an EP from some GPS or another. Don't do it! Join the clan of those who didn't look at a GPS during the whole trip. Another way of doing the same sort of thing is to just stab a finger on the small scale chart each morning where you think you might be, roughly, and use that as the EP, and trust to the magic of Cel Nav as you plot a PL from a morning site then run it up to cross with a Sun Mer Pass.
Secondly, prepare yourself to be very bored if you don't find some variety. Take a Kindle, or similar, full of all the top fiction you've ever read, and be surprised at how much you missed the first time, as you re-read it.
Good sailing
Michael Bradley 55 N