NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: UNK
Date: 2015 Jun 3, 19:30 +0100
Hewitt,
You are a very modest guy. It was your book and JS Letcher (from a second hand book shop in Falmouth (Cornwall, not New England) circa early 1980s that started me off on this madness called cel nav.+ a dive on HMS Association on Scillies ).Bowditch is wonderful (several editions on my boat) as is Raper 1840s. But I can sail round the world with only your book and a good quartz watch and , with Letcher + your book (trig logs etc) can do his full lunars, (if he had included your logs and trig logs, it would have been self contained, even for lunars) or in extremis, your “Chichester simple lunar altitude” to correct the watch. Would also need almanac for the lunars I guess. (moon GHA, declination and parallax). But hey. This aint going to happen, is it?! Yes , like everyone else, I love Lecky and Burch (and for me also John Karl). Wonderful stuff.
Francis
From: NavList@fer3.com [mailto:NavList@fer3.com] On Behalf Of Hewitt Schlereth
Sent: 03 June 2015 18:57
To: francisupchurch@gmail.com
Subject: [NavList] Re: Navigator's choice
Francis, thank you for the nomination, but if elected I will not serve. :-).
Greg, I treasure my vol. 2 1975 Bowditch. Everything is there.
Frank, I agree Lecky is a delight, but V2 B is the ne plus ultra in practicality.
Hewitt
On Jun 3, 2015, at 12:11 AM, Francis Upchurch <NoReply_Upchurch@fer3.com> wrote:
Could I cheat a bit and have 2 light weight books (less weight combined than Bowditch!) in my ditch bag? If so, I’d have John Letcher and also our very own Hewitt Schlereth’s Commonsense CelNav. which is totally self contained with a long term almanac and trig logs, instruction for simple lunar altitude method etc . Don’t need anything else. Could I also cheat and have my waterproof smart phone in my pocket? It has my entire library+ music+ chess+ pictures of family+ GPS+ charts+ cel nav software+ almanac. Etc etc. If it was a satellite phone, I could phone the wife and hopefully avoid or delay the divorce according to the formula D0=N2 X number of single handed sailing trips X number of sextants∕number of daily phone calls to wife x annual present of latest, fashionable smart phone for wife X promises that this is my last trip X promise to sell the boat (whoops, if sunk, use the insurance) and buy her that dream house. (where D0 = divorce avoided. It should come out as zero if the bottom line is a big enough number if 1-5, you are in big trouble and divorce imminent. If 5-10, probably a dead man!)
Francis
