Two Minor Successes

Russell Pass, Everglades
No LL

I'm proud to report two minor successes yesterday.

Number one: Since last summer in Rockland, I've been toying with my sextant. I've been trying to learn to take a sighting and to reduce the reading to latitude and longitude. After all, celestial navigation is a must for any serious sailor; especially one who has had direct experience at seeing all our electronics wiped out with a single stroke of lightning.

I originally had a beat up cheap plastic sextant that I bought on Ebay way back in 2004. I resisted buying the Nautical Almanac. Such almanacs are expensive and they only cover one year. Instead I tried using the examples and mini tables that came with the sextant's user manual. The best I was able to do was to locate myself with an error of 150 miles.

Now I have a new cheap plastic sextant. I also have three books on how to do it and a 2008 Nautial Almanac (which includes a secret tip in the footnotes telling how to use it for 2009). However, I can only practice when out to sea when we have clear sight of the true horizon as well as the celestial bodies. Yesterday, out at sea I was for the first time able to take a sighting and reduce it to a position that was less than 1 mile from where the GPS said we were. Hooray.

What a pain in the next it has been. All three books I have are terribly dense, obtuse, and I think full of bugs. I consider it a bug when a numerical example contains a number with no explanation of where it came from. I consider it a bug when the example says, X came from table Y by looking up factors A and B, but when I look look up (Y,A,B) the answer is not X. More infuriating, each of the three books does it differently. I have mastered a lot of difficult subjects in the past, but this
is one of the hardest. Perhaps I'm getting old.

Number two: salt air is an enemy of all things electrical. The contacts corrode and become non conductive. Boat wiring can be protected by tinning the wire, coating the connection in grease, then encapsulating it with heat-shrinkable tubing. You can't do that with cell phones, radios, computers, hand held GPS' and the like. I have constant connections with the power connection or the battery contacts, only working intermittantly. A year ago, I bought a tube of conductive carbon-impregnated
grease. It was a compromise. The online vendor also had silver impregnated and gold impregnated greases but those were too expensive. When it arrived, I threw the tube into a tool box and forgot about it. Yesterday, when cursing my hand-held GPS' refusal to power up, I remembered the grease. I tried it, and it worked fine. All I have to do is to put a tiny amount of this carbon grease on the end of a Q-Tip, then wipe the contact surfaces. Horray.