It is impossible to do this properly while looking through the telescope where the horizon always looks hopelessly blurred. ‘In this way, a star can be brought down to the horizon because the latter can be seen quite clearly with both eyes open. ‘I felt that I was becoming an expert in taking star sights since I discovered that it can be done without the telescope, keeping both eyes open,’ Bernard Moitessier wrote in his book Cape Horn: The Logical Route. Thane had used the ‘no scope, two eyes open’ approach on that first star sight that Moitessier had used on Joshua. We were in that ethereal slice in time photographers call the magic hour and navigators call civil twilight. ![]() If you looked hard enough, you could just make out the evening’s first stars. The western sky was painted an array of pinks, yellows and oranges, while overhead blue faded to black as night approached to starboard. The sun had only just sunk beneath the horizon to port. Getting a reliable sight from the sun is tricky when it’s hazy or overcast. “Holy smokes, this is so cool!” he exclaimed the first time he managed to grab an evening twilight star sight. He was an experienced offshore sailor, having sailed across the Atlantic westabout, double-handed with his wife, Brenda, on their Bavaria 37. Thane had signed up for the passage in spite of the celestial navigation part of it, not because of it. Ironically, friends and family following the rally from afar would know our position more accurately than we would through our YB tracker. Mia would keep a secret GPS record in a separate logbook in case of emergency. We had a paper passage chart, bound copies of the Nautical Almanac and the Sight Reduction Tables for Air Navigation. We had an AIS app on the iPad that allowed us to see targets around us and their CPAs, streamed wirelessly from the built-in Vesper XB8000 transceiver, but that would hide our own position. The old Garmin chartplotter’s GPS antenna had given up the ghost, so we didn’t have to worry about that, or the VHF, which was integrated to it. We had to eliminate the nearly-impossible-to-avoid GPS inputs while still maintaining some semblance of safety. A weak cold front passed overhead and suddenly Isbjörn was on port tack. Through the winter in the Caribbean, Mia and I had got so accustomed to sailing in 20 knots of breeze with small sails that it felt rather odd when we first sailed into an area off the coast of northern Florida more affected by continental weather than the tradewinds and lost the breeze for the first time in months. John made celestial bigger than just navigating for, after all, the likelihood of a modern day sailor actually needing celestial is effectively nil.īut the Trades faltered sooner than we all wanted them to. Here was someone who spoke my language, the language of the great sailing romantics like Moitessier and Sterling Hayden. John described celestial navigation in romantic terms, explaining it in a way that made it as inspiring as it was understandable. ![]() The very day that Gigi rounded the Horn, 25 January 1984, was the day I was born.ĭuring the weekend workshop I got to practise taking morning sun sights on the beach with the old Freiberger sextant that John had used to navigate around the Horn on that famous voyage. He’s well known to most sailors in America and made history in 1984 when he sailed a Contessa 32 called Gigi from New York to San Francisco the ‘wrong way’ round Cape Horn, an adventure that is immortalised in his book Cape Horn to Starboard. John is the reason I pursued a career on the ocean. I first learned celestial navigation ten years ago from John Kretschmer at a workshop he hosted at his home in Fort Lauderdale. Isbjörn carries electronic equipment, but the crew revelled in navigating by the stars.
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