Celestial Triumph

Haven't been able to post much lately as I have been busy studying hard for my Celestial Navigation course. I just got back from the final exam. Of course, I thought I nailed it, but we'll see what the professor says. I only have to get 70 percent to earn the American Sailing Association credential, so that should be in the bag. Being the perfectionist I am, I would not be happy with anything less than 100 percent.

That's highly unlikely, though. One thing I learned in the Celestial class is that it is easy to make small mistakes that accumulate into a wrong answer. I laughed when Jocelyn told me about a med student friend of hers years ago who had a professor that would grade exams by writing "DEAD" across the page of a wrong answer. While hopefully the consequences wouldn't be quite as grave, I suppose a Celestial professor could signify wrong answers by writing "LOST" across the faulty page. And if the wrong answer occurs when one is in a life raft trying to give one's position to a rescue team, perhaps the consequences aren't as far off as the med student's.

At it's core, Celestial Navigation is simply a lengthy procedure with many opportunities for introduction of errors. A series of tables have been assembled to make the job less trigonometrically challenging. The procedure involves looking up and entering a raft of numbers found on these tables or obtained by observation with a sextant. Then, one transfers the mostly arithmetic calculations to a Universal Plotting Sheet to get a Lat/Long fix of one's position. If you are not extremely attentive to detail, a small error can throw your result off by miles.

I finished the exam in two hours, and spent the final hour checking my work. I found one fairly significant error, which, when fixed, moved the final answer about 10 miles northwest. I'm fairly certain even with this careful check, some errors must remain, which leads me to hope partial credit is given when due.

Of course, everyone says Celestial Navigation is an arcane skill that will never be used. Our professor responds to this criticism by telling a story. One day long ago he was at a marine store where a salesperson was singing the virtues of a new GPS unit. Not impressed by a blowhard salesman, our professor challenged him to a contest. He would find their position using his sextant faster than the salesperson could do so using the slick new GPS unit. The salesperson quickly accepted the challenge. Then my professor friend hatched a condition. The contest would only be performed after a bucket of cold salt water had been poured over both him and the GPS unit. The point being that arcane as it may be, Celestial Nav and sextant skills may come in handy when all the fancy gear fails due to electrical outage or water immersion.

Let's hope we never have to test my sextant skills in anything but an academic manner aboard Windleblo. But as my sainted mother always said, "Good Luck Is Good Management."