Word: sextants
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...great Yankee skipper Joshua Slocum used only the simplest of navigational instruments-a compass, a sextant and his famous "dollar clock"-when he sailed his 37-ft. Spray round the world alone from 1895 to 1898. The solitary skipper of a spanking new sloop called the Oxy will find his life at sea far easier than Slocum's when he sails in a singlehanded race across the Atlantic next year. If he wants to relax and leave the helm, all he will have to do is flip a switch on an electronic self-steering device; day or night...
...says, afraid of "annihilation, of being surrounded by what is hostile, of loss and of being lost." The test that he devised for himself was formidable. Equipped with little more than a knife, a badly calibrated sextant and a crash course in Arabic, he planned to cross from the Atlantic to the Nile, a journey of 3,600 miles that had never been completed by a traveler alone...
...great. For the North Pole is a purely theoretical location hovering over immense seas of drifting, heaving ice. To Rawlins, Peary's claim that he made a beeline to the Pole over such terrain in-50° F. temperatures is hard to swallow, particularly since he used his sextant sparingly. On the last leg of his trek, he ordered his only thoroughly trained navigator to stay behind. Peary's recorded speeds of the final march far exceed the rate he had managed previously. Others have noted that the logs Peary presented as evidence were surprisingly clean considering that...
...cannot find what he wants in the catalogues of the big builders." He is a man who shuns complex modern gear that he cannot service himself. He can work with rope or wire or canvas, and the sailmaker's "palm" sits comfortably in his hand. His compass and sextant are instruments to be treated with care and reverence. He can read the tides and the weather, and he knows the movements of the navigator's stars. His library is charts and pilot manuals. His bible is the American Practical Navigator by Nathaniel Bowditch, a one-volume encyclopedia...
SURVEYOR 3 was sent to the moon 31 months ago and was not seen again until Astronaut Richard Gordon, in lunar orbit aboard Yankee Clipper last week, spotted it through his tracking sextant. Yet NASA months ago had planned the entire Apollo 12 mission around a successful landing near Surveyor. How could the space agency know the exact location of this tiny target in the vastness of the Ocean of Storms? The answer lies in a remarkable bit of space-age detective work...