Having been a liveaboard cruiser for eight years, Fergus Dunipace has always held a passion for navigation. Now needing to add an RYA Yachtmaster Ocean to further his sailing career, he took on the challenge of learning celestial navigation
I find the idea of navigating using the sun and stars fascinating and have owned a sextant for years, but never learnt how to use it properly, despite sailing 40,000 miles and crossing two oceans on my own boat!
I’ve often been asked to deliver yachts all over the world but, because of insurance, if the deliveries were beyond the remit of RYA Yachtmaster Offshore – a qualification I’ve held for 16 years – I’ve had to turn down the skipper jobs. This really frustrated me, so I decided it was time to step up and master the art of celestial navigation while studying for the RYA Yachtmaster Ocean qualification.
Online Theory Course
I looked into the options of a weeks’ shorebased course but, after a fair amount of research, decided to do an online course with Skippers Online. This course had good reviews and the open timeframe suited my calendar. While it primarily focused on celestial navigation, it also covered offshore weather, ocean passage planning and communications.
Prior to starting the course, I read Celestial Navigation by Tom Cunliffe and Basic Astro Navigation by Conrad Dixon, which gave me a good insight into the subject.
However, I can honestly say that getting my head around celestial navigation was one of the hardest things I have ever done. In the end, I completed the course in 60 hours. Knowing how long it took me to grasp the subject, I’m not sure I would have managed it in a classroom in five days.
Skippers Online made a complicated subject enjoyable to learn and even entertaining at times. I had the help of an instructor I could tap into at any stage I got stuck – which was quite often! And being able to go over sections again and again really worked for me.
Maths has never been my strongest suit and I was pretty rubbish at trigonometry at school. So, getting to grips with spherical trigonometry used in celestial navigation took time and practice. But the format of the online course tackled each part of the sight reduction process in manageable chunks before putting it all together.
My perseverance paid off and there was a defining moment where reducing sun sights suddenly made complete sense, after which, the reduction of stars and planets came relatively easily.
Once I was ready, I took the online exam, which had to be adjudicated by an RYA instructor
