NavList:

Jeremy et al:

Re post 14309, and the recollections of one John Brown via Frank Reed, the following caught my attention.

1. I joined Royal Mail Lines Limited, of London, as an indentured deck cadet in 1961, promising, amongst other things “not to frequent Taverns or Alehouses, unless upon (my Master’s) business”. Given the antics of some Brits I knew while working in London and "on the continent" years ago, staying out of alehouses and taverns must have been something of a strain, for as I recall, with some frequency, some people came back from lunch on Friday's somewhat less than sober.

2. Re the 5 star fix mentioned, I've shot 3 body fixes, ending up with a triangle, sometimes a small triangle, other times a not so small trialgle, this standing on the beach. What sort of figure might one get with a 5 body (star) fix, a pentagon? Re the 5 figure log tables used for calculation, back when I worked as a Piping Designer/Draftsman/Detailer, I used Smoley's Paralell Tables of Logs and Squares in the calculation of developed lengths for pipe fabrication. Log tables for both lineaar dimensions and trig functions were a great aid in calculations, however using log tables for Law of Sines/Cosines caculations must have been tedious. Of course, things like the HP 11C "programmable calculator" didn't exist then.

3. Mr. Brown's description of shipboard navigation routine sounds, to my uneducated ear, as if it must have been fairly busy. Of course, my efforts at celestial navigation amount to STANDING ON THE BEACH shooting, depending on the time of day/month, the sun, moon, Jupiter, Venus and or such stars as might be visible and that I could recognize, the most important aspect being I believe, for my own amusement.

4. Mr. Brown ends with the following, "How very far away it all seems now.", which is, I'm sure, a polite way of putting it.

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