A sextant is also a wonderful, wonderful thing.

However, after watching some of my colleagues operate a slide-rule (also a wonderfully precise manual measuring instrument) and come up with some of the strangest conclusions, I’m pretty confident in stating that with the sextant, navigator error was probably the biggest weak point. Of course, the percentage bad navigators probably went WAY down over time by means of attrition.

Of course, if you don’t like building things, you can always use solar energy. The type of GPS unit you use on a boat takes very little energy to run and the sun is quite strong on the ocean.

Also, while I’ve not gone sailing (yet), I love offshore fishing, so I do know about the ocean. Charts are great and all, but unless you are doing it out of love, you might as well stick to a GPS and sonar (they may suck at finding fish that bite, but they are quite useful for depth finding) and only use your charts for necessary reference.

I’ve got no problem with someone using a sextant because they want to, but if they use it because it’s ‘superior’, then they don’t really know what they’re talking about. I’d like to remind you that, since the government allowed GPS to be accurate a few decades ago (yes, to make civilian GPS less reliable than military GPS, the US government intentionally made it suck if you didn’t have the right codes), the precision of GPS has become quite astounding. Standard GPS modules can place you within about eight feet of your location.