As noted in a comment to the previous post about cyclone Narelle, the storm has tracked all the way across Australia and then turned south and has made its third landfall and looks to pass east of Perth. A truly long lived and unusual storm.
I am moving GANNET to a new slip at the end of A Dock. It has the advantages of being the only single slip on A Dock, will be easier to enter and exit; and as you know I like edges. In doing so I have moved the considerable stuff in my dock box. It took three trips with a dock cart. Mostly paint and maintenance supplies, but also a bosun’s chair and the Jordan drogue. I came across a bag in which I found my long unused sextant. Although it was in a case as well as the bag, I expected the mirrors to be ruined by time and moisture, but they weren’t. In fact the sextant, a Davis Mark 25, cleaned up well and is in excellent condition.
I am among the last to have had to navigate by sextant. My first was a U.S. Navy WW2 sextant made by David White Co. in Milwaukee that I bought used in the late 1960s for $100 which according to an inflation calculator would be a startling $939 now. I checked and David White is still in business making surveying instruments, not sextants.
I taught myself celestial navigation from books and used that sextant on EGREGIOUS and CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE until it was lost when CT pitch-poled. When I resumed the voyage I made the passage from Port Vila, Vanuatu, to Cairns, Australia using a plastic sextant. I found it to be accurate, but had to realign the mirrors after every sight. In Cairns, I bought a good German Zeiss Frieberger sextant. I checked and they are still being made and have one model for $1022 and another $1584.
The Davis Mark 25 can be bought for as little as $367.
I have not taken a sextant sight for more than twenty years, but I believe that if you go offshore it is wise to have a sextant and the current Nautical Almanac on board and know at least how to take a noon sight for latitude which is simple and does not even require exact time. This seems particularly true when one reads increasingly of GPS jamming, which in case of a large scale war would surely be extensive.
I am nearly the end of the 1100 page trek through THE PENGUIN BOOK OF ENGLISH VERSE, and trek it has been. The editors of this anthology and I have very different tastes in poetry and when I have made it to the end I will delete the book from my library. Most books of poetry I reread often. Not this one. However I have found a few poems I enjoy and admire. Here are three from last century about feelings between men and women.
And this by A. E. Housman.
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