Issue 13 : Jul/Aug 2000
Since Carl departed, there is no one left to speak for his “billions and billions” of stars. With Sagan gone, his stars are still out there, as they have been since a lost sailor ten millennia ago lifted his eyes for guidance. But we are paying less attention.
Since 1960, an iota of time as the stars go, fewer and fewer sailors raise their eyes to the heavens for guidance across the empty oceans. We have replaced Sagan’s glorious mystery of distant stars with clickety little stellar imitations . . . satellites. We manufacture our stars these days . . . a process that at once increases our control of our lives while, at the same time, diminishes our ability to glory in the unknowable mysteries of the universe. We have replaced distant stars with close-by satellites, thereby reducing our vision from unknowable parsecs to a mere few hundred miles. In my book, a bad trade.
In 1976, I bought a Davis plastic sextant (the only one I could afford) and set out from Moorhead City toward the Azores. With the Davis in one hand and Mary Blewitt’s crystalline little book in the other, I committed myself and my crew to the guidance of the immutable stars. My boat was a 32-foot Westsail, as good a vessel as a tyro sailor could hope for. My experience was more bravado than fact, and my crew was even dumber than I, if that could be possible.
I lost my ocean virginity on that passage, a process of high exultation. Celestial sights were taken daily, and I learned the hard way that an accurate sight from the deck of a leaping, swooping sailboat is more a matter of art than of science . . . a tradeoff I would make any time.
My findings were erratic but, on the average, reassuring. Even when, at the end of the passage, I found myself 40 miles to starboard of the port of Horta, it was small matter to me, after a glorious passage across 3,000 miles of ocean. My splendid achievement was not that I had missed by 40 miles, but that, with the aid of the stars, art, and little technology, I had made it at all.
I am Luddite enough to be sentimental about the passing of the stars. It is feckless to gaze up at a satellite and wonder what magical mysteries it conceals. A satellite conceals nothing . . . indeed, that is the basis of its usefulness. The stars conceal almost everything about themselves except the one thing important to every sailor . . . where they are.
Wonder and the mystery are passing from us. We have pulled back from the whirling spheres of Carl’s heavens and are settling for the smallest sphere imaginable. Where, in the past, we were encouraged, with art and patience, to reach out into unimaginable mysteries to determine our place on Earth, we now push a little button and all is revealed . . . except the really important stuff.
Sailor, take very good care of your old sextant. Polish it, clean it, and by all means, practice on it. Who knows what is the future of satellites?
But we all know what is the future of the stars.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
