I read with interest an article about GPS at Panbo.com which started me thinking about how much GPS there is these days, my mobile phone has a GPS with Google maps, you can get a tag for your dog or pet with a GPS locater. Cars have GPS navigators, hill walkers, mountain climbers, arctic explorers, jungle adventurers literally every man and woman and his/her dog has GPS these days. It’s all GPS.
Now I can remember the days when it was new to ships and had just been downgraded in classification from the US military for use in civilian applications for navigation of commercial vessels. The units were bulky and broke down regularly and we used to check the accuracy of the GPS by comparing our celestial observations with the GPS, the celestial observation being the more accurate of the two. Close to land the GPS was turned off and one navigated with the radar and visual bearings….mark one eyeball method being used too. Surprisingly enough we managed to get in and out of port without any problems, and the world kept turning. In the Red Sea, you would get calls from Greek ships on the VHF radio asking “have you GPS?” and “what is your position?” the standard answer being “on the bridge….”
It didn’t take too long before GPS was being used to test the accuracy of celestial observations, although at the turn of the millenium it looked bad for GPS for a while because of the millennium bug but the clock kept ticking and the world kept turning and the GPS kept spitting out positions with lots of decimal places. I don’t think that many officers on ships deep sea know how to use the sextant any more or where it is, or what it is….something from the old days anyway. You have an entire generation of deck officers who know how to plot a position from a GPS, but who don’t really know where they are or where they are going to, or what the next course will be, or what the ETA is….maybe not that bad but sometimes I wonder!
Anyway this article mentions delays in implementing upgrades and even suggests an entire collapse of the system, shock horror, the world would be full of defunct electronic receivers and a lot of people who were suddenly lost, not knowing where they were going to or coming from, or where the dog was or what street they were on, and “map reading” what is that some kind of 20th century thing?
I don’t think we are that close but you can hear the phrases “who would have thought it could happen ?” and “GPS failure creates havoc on road networks, drivers completely lost….”
Time to dust off the sextant methinks……or who knows where we will end up!
on 
on 
on 
on 
Powered by FireStats
It won’t be long before all that’s left of sextants is art photography of ‘unknown’ objects. Great post.
As an “old man” I must say:
The sextant is not dependent upon electricity (unlike many forms of modern navigation) or anything human-controlled (like GPS satellites). For these reasons, it is considered an eminently practical back-up navigation tool for ships.
For more info, see Wikipedia
Great article Tim.
When I was a lad, I used to love seeing how accurate my sun sigths were and how fast I could do them. Filled in the boredom of a long ocean passage. One of my last trips using a sextant was on a AHTS towing a relic from W Africa to Portugal and all we had were sextants and radars to navigate with besides the eyeball. It was a rush to find our way home without fancy electronics.
Reading accident reports is a pastime of mine and many times it comes up that it appears today’s navigators have lost their feeling and only plot lat/long. Even coastal nav is reduced to trusting the GPS. Do ships still have a pelorus on the bride wing? Or is left in a box along with the ISM stuff?
I still work in a port and it is amazing to see some crews – I just pity the old man and the tools he has to work with.
Cheers
Chris
Always wanted to learn celestial-nav. There’s a similar trend in aviation. I’ve never flown in a plane that didn’t have GPS. Until recently it was a back up for the old reliables. VOR,HSI,ADF and good old pilotage and DR.
An early instructor I had once asked me to point out our position on the chart after shutting down the GPS in flight. When I finished scratching my head and humming and hawing I learned a priceless lesson.
Thanks for all the comments folks, the sextant is very close to the ISM box Chris but not quite in there! The navigation is very lat and long, and I get quare looks when I take a bearing on the bridge wing repeater. I was never a super star myself with the sextant but had the long 6 days on one course voyages as a cadet with ex-RFA second mates who were able to impart some of their wisdom. If push came to shove I’d manage.
I didn’t mention DR in my post Dev, but that was also common to work out estimated positions and dead reckoned positions until the sight gave you a fix. We used to use the air nav tables to do quick sights, although I never saw a bubble sextant in real life those early aviators were brave.
Worse things qre to come with total dependency on ECDIS…
ECDIS will come inevitable as primary navigation tool, and youngsters will even forget altogether to take radar bearings and all.
Eyeball-Mark-I-generation will be displaced with a videogame-geneartion, having no knowhow of the basics of navigation