NavList:

Jared you wrote:

"Nice theory.<G> In 1985(?) I was crewing out of Newport, RI and we had
satnav on the boat. Except, none of us could get it or the HF radio to work,
apparently the wiring to the autotuner and antennas was fugatz and we had
other things to work on. Since the Newport Boat Show was in town that
weekend, I figured SOMEone had to have a way to give us the time. Nope. No
one. And lacking any better ideas (and you remember that long distance calls
from pay phones CO$$T money back then, no cells phones either) I called the
Point Judith USCG station to ask them for a time reference."

 

What? No sextant handy?? I realize I'm about twenty years too late with this suggestion <g>, but there's another way. Since you knew your location, and probably could pick off your latitude and longitude to the nearest second of arc from your chart, you could have done the modern equivalent of a "time sight" in reverse to get GMT from the known longitude. You shoot some object, most likely the Sun (avoid the Moon for this trick), when close to the prime vertical (azm=90 or 270) if possible, and work up a line of position based on the watch time of the sight (your initial estimate of GMT). If that LOP doesn't pass through your boat, then you try again with a different watch time (if it misses by 15 minutes of arc in longitude, then you adjust your watch time by one minute). Even if you're already some miles off-shore, you could get a celestial fix as soon as practical and compare with a terrestrial fix or DR. This will get you GMT accurate to a few seconds typically.

 

There was a story (that I've read somewhere --quite possibly on this list) about a navigator sailing the Pacific alone who braved dangerous weather one night to row out from the safety of a comfortable tropical island to wind his chronometer aboard his vessel because he was so worried about losing Greenwich Time. But the teller of the tale noted that this was unnecessary and reckless since he was "parked" at a place with a known longitude. He could easily have shot a time sight to reset his chronometer even if it had run down. Anyone know the details of this story?

 

By the way, when in range, a cell phone makes an excellent chronometer, but you have to watch out for a tower (cell) with a bad clock. For several weeks a few years ago, I could turn Daylight Savings Time on and off by walking to the end of my street.