NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: lifeboat navigation
From: Jared Sherman
Date: 2002 Oct 24, 11:14 -0400
From: Jared Sherman
Date: 2002 Oct 24, 11:14 -0400
Dr. Kolbe, I was very intentionally ignoring that issueand did suggest that the satphone is only one among the tools to be included. Some of the newer models include position finding ability, so that when the user places a call their position may be transmitted automatically with it. Others do not. Absent that ability to automatically locate the user, they still allow the user to communicate their position once it has been found by other means. The position of a commercial ship's life boat which may carry 140 survivors including training crew/officers is very different from that of a yacht's life raft, where instruments like a sextant will probably be of little use unless one can be sure that everyone on the yacht knows how to use the sextant, the atlas, and the various tables required for it. And then somehow keep the atlas dry enough to use. And then hope that if only one person knows how to use it, they are unharmed and on board. I do not argue those points either either. I merely suggest that we are in an age where "an" appropriate tool may simply be the one that can contact a higher power, which is capable of *rescuing* the raft regardless of the skill level or the number of the survivors, in most parts of the world. Given a spare battery, a vinyl "EWA" type use pouch, and a Pelican case to protect the contents and keep them dry, long-term reliable storage of these devices is not difficult either. Incidentally, if you are going to carry Casio watches, I may suggest their nice newer models--which allow for some 600 GPS fixes on the one battery included with the watch. Coincidentally, again, cheaper than many sextants and requiring less training for use. But worn on your wrist, it can give you daily time *and* a reserve GPS that will make it to the life raft or boat *if* you do. While a sextant in a lifeboat may be useful, absent both a means of propulsion and a means of communication it may make for only a meager supply of fishing parts. Then we have the case of the two men recently found off the coasts of the US in their sailboats: The one man off North Carolina (?) who had drifted up from the Florida Keys, the other man off South America (!) who had drifted down from California, originally 26 miles from the US coast. Would these men have made any use of a sextant? Could they have gained any aid from it? Or could they have gained more substantial aid from some other device? I have great doubt that an art form (the art of navigation) is what life boats really need, when there are so many modern tools that can accomplish so much more for the untrained user. That does not diminish the purposes of the art.