38Talk:

I would love to hear from others about projects in navigation, whether celestial navigation or piloting or even modern navigation issues that may affect 38th Voyager projects. Myself, I will be doing some celestial navigation demos and 'experiments' if the weather is good, and for any of you who are on the same leg as me, Stellwagen Day 1, please feel free to bug me during our sail. I plan to bring along a quadrant (octant) from c.1840 and a sextant from c.1900 which would, of course, cover nicely the historical whaling period for the Charles W. Morgan. You gotta get a photo of yourself with an old quadrant shooting the Sun, right? I'll also have a modern sextant. Are there any other traditional instruments aboard the Morgan, maybe crew members' sextants?

The sailing dates on the 38th Voyage unfortunately are about as bad as they could be for "lunars", my particular favorite navigation topic, but I may manage some sights on-board the night before. For those of you who have already sailed, did you spend time on deck during the night?

Attached is a little map I made, way back in 2003 (!), of the first voyage of the Charles W. Morgan showing the dates/locations where they shot lunars for longitude (yellow circles and squares). Lunars were already in steep decline by the 1840s, but they did actively use them for navigation on that first voyage.

-FER

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