Come at 8:30 to check in and have your continental breakfast.
The seminar starts at 9AM sharp.
Buffet Lunch will be served on the deck at NOON.
Bring your sextant, if you have one. There will be a few available if you do not have one.

Introduction

There are about forty different methods of navigating celestially that are in use today.  All are complicated and learning even the ones commonly known to be “easy” can still be confusing. All require significant theoretical study and some even require the use of scientific calculators and knowledge of higher mathematics.

In the Famous Three Hour Tour, Capt. Mike has successfully eliminated the minutia, almost all the math, and has created a method which provides a comfortable degree of accuracy for any sailor to find their way across any ocean.  Yes, all in three hours!

Course Outline

• Introduction and Important History
• Navigation in the age of Discovery
• There Be Dragons Here…

Think Like a Navigator

• Tour of the Blue Marble we call Planet Earth
• Let’s look up!

Time is Longitude

• Understanding time
• GMT/UTC
• Time Zones
  • As Navigator, you get to tell the Captain what time it is aboard the boat!
• Clocks aboard the boat

Nautical Almanac

• We’ll take a tour of this essential reference, and learn what data we need to pull from it to find the position of the sun at any moment of the day.
• How to predict “noon.”
• GHA
• Declination

The Sextant

• How it works
• What we do with it
• How to correct it for increased accuracy in our position finding

The Sun’s Travels During the Day

• Measure three times, cut once.

Calculating our Position

• Drawing three important pictures to assist your thought process

Plot the Position of your Boat!!!

• Chart vs Universal Plotting Sheet

 Tricks and Formulary

• 90 degrees is the same as 89 degrees and 59 minutes and 10 tenths of a minute
• Zenith Distance equals 90 degrees minus Observed Altitude (ho)
• GHA equals Longitude if corrected for East and West labels
• Use Simulus method for greater accuracy in calculating longitude
• Draw the simple diagram EACH TIME to determine the simple arithmetic necessary to find Latitude
• Parallel lines have identical angles—the reason we can use the horizon to measure celestial angles
• Zenith Distance is a real measurement on the earth…it’s the number of degrees, times 60
• The Earth is a sphere, 360 degrees around. It moves relative to the sun (or, as the navigator sees things, the sun moves across the surface of the earth) 15 degrees each hour, so there are 24 hours in a day (24 times 15 equals 360)