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Navigation -- indeed all of seafaring -- is a pretty conservative,
traditional activity.  It's pretty dangerous out there and people have a
tendency to choose the devil they know (ie, tried and proven ways) over the
devil they don't (newfangled stuff which might bring a whole lot of benefit
or might catastrophically fail).

While I have less fear of electronic navigation than others, I would choose
the sextant.  My reason is that while I might have many, many cloudy days
where I would have to depend on DRs, short of dropping it overboard, a
sextant can't catastrophically fail the way a GPS can (for sure, it's a
pretty improbable event, but like a hole in the boat, you're in pretty deep
sneakers if it does occur).

NOW, to make things really interesting:  Russell's question is a bit unfair
in that the sextant choice costs more than twice the cost of a GPS, so let
me pose a variant:

If you had a choice of TWO GPS's or ONE sextant, which would you choose?

I would flip-flop and choose the pair GPS's.  While any single GPS has a
tiny chance of catastrophic failure, the chance of both failing is far, far
less than other more significant and life-threatening catastrophes which
one might experience on the cruise.  As the old saying goes, "the prudent
navigator does not rely on a single source of information."  While I would
still be dependent on those satellites in the sky, once the signal leaves
them I've essentially got two independent navigation systems.

Looking forward to other's opinions.

Lu

At 03:52 PM 8/3/99 +0200, you wrote:
>While we're on the subject of how to best spend the $1000, I noted with
>interest that everyone made provision for at least one GPS receiver - I
>certainly agree. Now how about the following, slightly modified situation?
>Which would you choose, given only the following two choices for your
>navigational aspects, with no other options allowed:
>Either,
>1)      One GPS receiver
>
>        OR
>
>2)      Sextant, tables and timepiece etc.
>
>Assume that this is for an ocean crossing and perhaps for extended cruising
>afterwards.
>
>Cheers
>Russell
>

   

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