in 1980, when gps technology was financially beyond the reach of the average sailor, i sailed across the atlantic. from gibraltar to the madeira islands to the british virgin islands. we used a plastic sextant, a shortwave radio tuned to the bbc who, at that time, counted down the seconds to every g.m.t. hour, the aforementioned books of declination, and did the math by hand. we hit the anegada passage right on the money after a crossing of 40 days.

yes, it builds character. one hand for the boat and one hand for you is challenging when it takes two hands to use the sextant, never mind the radio.

I have taken exactly one sextant reading in my life. I placed our position near Santa Cruz Island, which was true enough, but i plotted us on the south side, while it was apparent that we were on the north side... MY GPS does a whole lot better, even on a bad day.

A celestial position accurate within 20nm of your actual position is considered a good fix upon the open ocean. At my peak (1983) my position accuracy was 5nm consistently.

Sure, anything is possible but the ship I was on did not have any of that stuff. You use the stuff you have, not what is technologically possible. Installing a dedicated scope for celestial nav seems highly unlikely.

Navy Navsat was hot stuff before GPS came along. But when we deployed at least one time a LORAN receiver was added because it was old, proven technology that was more available.

I've read stories of many military platforms (aircraft mostly) being saved by crew personal purchase hand-held GPS because the standard equipment in the platform did not yet include GPS (procurement/cost/needs of the service etc can delay sensible upgrades)

Thank you very much! That is nice to know. I was off by about ten NM as I recall....