NavList:

I just today read your Word document, posted here on this list a while back, on the Time Sight and "old navigation".  Fascinating...and very helpful, as it highlights some things that older navigation and seamanship works take for granted that I would know.  I had this hunch that there was some method of determining longitude as a separate procedure from the noon-sight determination of latitude, but I had never seen any description of it until I ran into John Karl's book.

My edition of Bowditch (published in 1977) talks about how the use of the noon-latitude sight was no longer much used by navigators.  The object of the exercise, it said, is to get an LOP to cross with another LOP.  It doesn't matter if one of those LOPs happens to be a meridian of longitude and the other is a parallel of latitude.  As long as there is a good cut, you are happy.

Sail Canada's celestial navigation exam does not talk about time sights, but it does place considerable emphasis still on the noon-latitude sight.  Most of the Sail Canada people are involved in "filling the pipeline" with Canadian dinghy sailors to compete in the Olympics.  Teaching celestial navigation is something of an afterthought.  I wonder, in fact, if the basic exam as it now stands was not formatted prior to the invention of quartz watches in the 1960s.

But I digress.  Thank you again for your thoughtful essay.

Bob