Celestial Navigation

It’s been a while since I updated the blog, I have been trying to get my head around celestial navigation and with the arrival of my new toys, sextant, sight reduction tables and universal plotting sheets, then I feel the need to update you with my progress.

After a long delay with a British company on ordering the above equipment and on chasing up the company to see were our order was and not getting any satisfaction, we decided to have a look elsewhere and came across Celstaire, who are an American company, I sent then an email with a provisional order for the equipment and got a very prompt reply, which was a good sign of things to come?

Ken from Celstaire, indicated that all the equipment was in stock and could be shipped as soon as I placed the order, without any further hesitation I placed the order on Thursday morning and by Tuesday morning the equipment was in my possession. Exactly what I ordered and it all came neatly packaged and in one piece. I can highly recommend this company and I am very impressed with the service and products they offer ten out of ten.

If you want to have a look at the web site please follow the link: http://www.celestaire.com/



Tuesday night is set aside attending the RYA Ocean class at Fleetwood, we are now getting down to calculating a fix from noon sights and sun-run-sun sights, which from my point of view is one of the main reasons for attending the course, the idea being we have an alternative way of calculating our position other than relying on GPS all the time.

To assist with the course I have bought a couple of books, Ocean sailing - Tom Cunliffe, Ocean Yachtmaster - Adlard Coles - Pat Langley-Price & Philip Ouvry, both of these books help in different ways, due to the different approach in the styles of writing.



Last week Paul who is also attending the course at Fleetwood and myself were ‘shooting stars’ with the new sextant on the car park after the class. By coincidence the latter part of the course on Tuesday night was spent doing star recognition. I am really impressed with the sextant, which as far as sextants go is the whole horizon version, not traditional split view horizon. I am sure the traditionalist out there will be booing at this point. I am very happy with it and that’s what matters!

As part of the course I am trying to develop various sight reduction sheets for each of the celestial body’s and so far it really is helping me to piece things together, I would recommend anyone who is interested in this approach do the same thing and develop your own method, which you can remember and reproduce.

This weekend was Jo’s birthday and we now have a rule about buying each other presents, which is it must be something that each one us would find useful on our adventures. Saturday morning Jo was the proud owner of a new hand held GPS Garmin 72, a complete set of admiralty Caribbean leisure charts, solio solar panel, freedom flashlight and a large quantity of rechargeable AA batteries.