Wednesday morning I cleaned out my cabin, packed my gear and said goodbye to the boat.  I walked back up to the sailing school arriving at 0900, “Come on in, sit down, here is the exam paper, you have 2 hours” the Examiner said to me cheerfully.  “Wow” I thought, this is the first hint […]

Today started at 0530, I plotted a quick EP to work out my LHA and GHA of Aries (me on the ocean compared to the Sheep on the dish) so I can go on deck and take a dawn star sight.  

It has taken me a fortnight to get to grips with sun run sun, Moon and planet sights.  I still have around 800 miles of the trip left to fathom star sights.  I’ve been shying away from this somewhat as the pro-forma given in Mr Cunliffe’s book is basically a page containing seven columns of […]

I was woken just before my 0400 watch by the sound of something small and metallic, like a shackle or pin landing on the deck above my head.  Our skipper  checks the foredeck and confirms both of our suspicions.  There is a nut and washer on the deck and  the pin (a large bolt) that […]

I’m now fairly confident that I have got the hang of  sun sight reduction, sun run sun plots, moon and planet sights and have some beautiful fixes on my plotting sheets, a couple of Sun positions I am super proud of, a lovely fix using Venus and Polaris and another using the Sun and Moon […]

After 8 days of frantically scribbling numbers into my notebook varying amounts of light I now had a lot to catch up.  Having finally understood sun sight reduction it was time to get to grips with the Moon, planets and the stars.  My quest now, whilst maintaining my sun-run-sun routine, is to work through all […]

I’d read about Plotting Sheets briefly on the online course and while the three instruction books I had on board each touched on the plotting sheet, there seemed to be some assumed knowledge here that I didn’t have.  The idiot me could not find a basic step by step instruction guide.  The sheets themselves did […]

This was the chapter I didn’t quite get to on the online course, so now I’m counting on having brought the right books, Google or Youtube tutorials are not available out here.  I found it a little frustrating that I’d paid for an online theory course, but hadn’t considered that there was no option to […]

With the quest for noon latitude only allowing for one attempt per day I had been filling the hours taking morning and afternoon sun sights and observations on other celestial bodies, the Moon, Venus, Polaris and a whole host of stars, but I had very little idea what I was to do with all this […]

It turns out that during the day a sailor has only one real chance at confirming the ship’s latitude, this happens at noon each day.  When the Sun is at her highest point in the sky we can take our sextant, measure the angle between the Sun and the horizon and after applying some maths […]