NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Tom Sult
Date: 2015 Oct 13, 17:14 -0500
Tom Sult, MD
Francis, what a lovely vignette about you, the kids and the noon sight. It's their sort of reaction that qualifies celestial an art.HewittWith the pace of technological advance, I suspect we could soon all have gps type chips embedded in our brains and just know "where we are" like homing pigeons.
I doubt whether any computer will ever tell us "who we are" though.
Meanwhile, I took my children and other youngsters sailing this summer, using wind and tide, engine quiet. Fishing with hand lines and feathers. Fresh mackeral barbequed on the beach. A couple of meridian noon sights. A couple of lunars for the time. I asked the eldest boy, armed with the Davis 111, to "call noon" a la Captain Aubrey!
You should have seen the glow of wonder in their eyes as they helped to pencil in a fix on the beautiful paper chart. It seemed almost magical to them and a bit like an ancient religious ceremony.
No such reaction to the GPS position telling us where we really were.
The answer is, keep teaching the next generation the wonders and beauty of the art. I have put my sextants and slide rules in my will for my kids to follow on. (not just yet , I hope!)
Keep up the good work all you teachers in Navlist.
Francis
