NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Lawrie Elms
Date: 2022 Sep 20, 11:49 -0700
As a newcomer to the Site, I have been gaining a degree of ground speed by merrily plodding through the Archive. I was a Mariner for almost all of my working life and, naturally, had to go through a Board of Trade examination system to become qualified. At the time, I thought the curriculum demanding of brain-space and, reading through the gems of the Archive, I have come to realise that I had forgotten that I had already forgot a great deal of navigational KOP's(knowledge of principles). All the Nav, was just a means of doing a job of work and a tool to get us where we needed to be. No-one I knew ever looked at Cel-Nav any other way.
What residuals I now remember, show me that the education I needed for seagoing, was only a very small part of a Cel-Nav pie. 'Shudder to think that I once fancied the life of a 'Droggy and dipped, with long-gone avidness, into the Admiralty Manual of Hydrographic Survey Vol 2.
I am currently up to 1977 with the Archive and I've found some of the 'going', slightly easier with time and thought, , though a great deal of it is presently beyond my compass. Being a 'dyed-in-the-wool', exponent of long-hand tabular ways of sight reduction, since barely into my teens, I will be looking forward to practically tackling some of the more elevated methods being discussed here on NavList.
Regards All
Lawrie E.