Position: 2000 LT, 14°45’ S, 001°11’E
Date:Tuesday May 11, 2010

dead reackoning

For educational purposes our GPS has been covered for a week already. We navigate is the old-fashioned way. That’s the way it should be done on a Clipper like ours. The sextants are out of the box again, the mirrors are adjusted and our brains are working hard again. It’s a lot more effort than writing the digits from the GPS in the logbook.
 
For many the sextant is a magical instrument, already in the old days. In the great days of sailing one kept the secret to itself. On the wide ocean it was a way of stopping every form of mutiny. Nowadays the landlubber still has no idea of how we can fix a position by looking through the sextant.
 
With the invention of the GPS en a chart plotter mutiny is child play, so with no fear we can explain about the sextant. Without the knowledge about a guessed position this instrument is not usefull. This is what we call “dead reckoning”. More information about this dead reckoning in the next PIM…
 
Richard Slootweg
Captain Clipper Stad Amsterdam