NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: lifeboat navigation
From: R. Walker
Date: 2002 Oct 24, 10:51 -0500
From: R. Walker
Date: 2002 Oct 24, 10:51 -0500
> jared.sherman@VERIZON.NET > 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? It occurs to me what these guys really needed was oar locks and a pair of appropriate oars. Adding a 1kt - 1.5kt east or west vector to their course made good wouldn't have been the most elegant solution, but in both cases likely would have gotten them within site of land with a few days work. A sextant and tables could certainly provide a moral boost by confirming each days gradual progress, as well as potentially alerting the adrift person to an unexpected eddy in the ocean currents that might by accident be running directly counter to the added oar provided vector. So my feeling is that the sextant and accessories necessary to plot position without electrical power stay on the boat; a manual PUR desalinization pump would probably be a better choice for liferaft dollars. Richard Walker Conroe, TX http://people.txucom.net/~rwwamtek/kayak_log.html