The Sailboat Thread!

[CarlD]

"a remote controlled sailboat...."

That just doesn't quite cut it!

If you have a sextant as a backup, do you regularly practice with it to be sure you can do a sight-reduction? (correctly, that is!) If not, put the sextant up on eBay! I have a number of them. For a while you could buy aircraft periscope sextants (really octants) for as little as $50. The gummint paid about $2500/per for these in the '60s' and they were installed in B-52's. In Dale Brown's "Flight of The Old Dog" the hero, a bombadier, wants his sextant back...

The periscope sextants are incredibly beautiful pieces, with the 'scope section filled with nitrogen so it wouldn't condense on the inside when exposed to the brutally cold wind out the top of a B-52 at 40,000 feet!

Then there are the left-handed sextants--

But you can get a Davis plastic sextant for about $40 and can sail around the world with it--as long as you have an accurate watch and a current nautical almanac.

Or you can use ANY hand-held GPS. They all pump out Lat/Long and you can use that on a chart.

A really cool site to buy nav stuff is :
www.Celestaire.com Some stuff is horribly over-priced, but other stuff is really reasonable. I was poking around there when I saw the inflatable sailboat....Should arrive today!