"Sextant Reflections"

[HenryC]

https://goodoldboat.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/50-53_GOB97_JA97_Sextant.pdf

[Gerry]

I purchased a Hughes and Son 1941 sextant a year ago.  It took me a month and two books to learn how to use it.  So far I have only used it on land and only with the sun.  Thanks to this forum, I am now inspired to try celestial sightings.  I think I will stay on land sightings for now.  Fun article.

[HenryC]

Do you have a distant horizon at your land site? Can you get to a seashore or the shore of a large lake from where you live?

[deisher6]

Hey HenryC:
I have not one but two sextants and would love to learn to navigate with one.  If you are ever near New Bern, NC I would offer you food, shelte,r and sailing in exchange for a lesson.

regards charlie

[HenryC]

Yo, Charlie,

I'd love to take you up on that, but other commitments demand I stay near my home base in Fort Lauderdale.  However, if you ever plan to be in my area, please look me up.

I have a series of about a dozen articles here on this website (do a search on "CelNav Zero",  "CelNav One..." , etc) that are designed to teach your the rudiments.  Let me know how they work out (and keep in mind the sample problems need to be updated for the 2020 Nautical Almanac).

Otherwise, I'll be happy to do anything I can to help.

[bruce]

Thanks Henry, your CelNav series looks excellent! I'm going to enjoy reading through it.

I was the ship's navigator on a Navy frigate from summer of '73 to summer of '76. We had Omega and Loran-C, and did have one of the early Navsat receivers while an admiral was embarked while waiting for his new flagship, with more appropriate quarters than we could offer, but that was just a couple of weeks. (The previous flagship and admiral were sent home after a pre-dawn collision with a freighter as the convoy approached the Atlantic terminus of the Panama Canal.)

We rarely had to rely on celestial, but our standing policy was to shoot stars at dawn and dusk, if the conditions were good and operations permitted, to keep our skills up. As I recall, that was a couple of times a week on average, it really depended where we were and the prevailing conditions. The Caribbean was usually clear, maybe with brief showers; north of Norfolk we would rarely get a clear enough sky and good horizon. Occasionally we'd shoot a LAN if we were bored.

GPS is great, of course, but all systems can fail, and charts, electronic and paper, can be wrong. The more info the better.

[HenryC]

Ahoy, Bruce

I was a QM on a guided missile frigate (USS Dewey, DLG-14) during the Gulf of Tonkin/Pueblo Crisis era).  I've got some sea stories for ya...

https://qmss.com/seastory.html

You know what the difference is between a sea story and a fairy tale?
A fairy tale starts off "Once upon a time...".  A sea story starts off "Now this is no shit, you guys!"

[bruce]

You've done a good job documenting your time in the Navy. I'll include just a brief overview here.

I went on active duty in June '72, as the war was winding down. My first ship was the USS Purdy, DD-734, a WWII vintage destroyer, never FRAMed (modernized), that coincidently served as a reserve training vessel that you refer to, out of Fall River, MA. She was decommissioned in '73.

My next ship was a new commission, the USS Truett, FF1095, out of Norfolk. Her primary mission was anti-submarine warfare, with nuclear-capable ASW rockets, a helicopter, a huge sonar dome on the bow, and a variable depth sonar (VDS) that could be lowered (from a huge compartment in the stern nicknamed the ballroom) to below the thermocline where subs would often hide. As you can imagine, the very real risk to our subs during operational drills, and the likelihood that a deployed VDS would foul on something else if not a sub, meant that once the system was tested and accepted by the Navy during shakedown, it was never used.

As an ASW platform, the Truett never would have been deployed to Viet Nam. We did have a radar that could monitor incoming air traffic, but our only anti-aircraft weapon was a single 5" gun. Good luck with that. We did transit the Pacific coast of South America in a show-the-flag cruise, conducting operations with allies (often using old warships we had sold them), but most of our time was spent in the Atlantic, from Cape Horn to the Arctic Circle, keeping tabs on the Soviet Union.