GPS Failure Forces Sailor to Navigate by Stars, Discovers He Cannot Identify a Single Constellation

Solo sailor Mitchell Sextant was forced to navigate by celestial observation after a complete electronics failure 120 miles offshore, only to discover that despite thirty years of sailing experience and a prominently displayed sextant aboard his vessel, he could not identify a single star or constellation. 'I've always said celestial navigation is the true mariner's art,' Sextant told the Coast Guard via his backup VHF radio, which still worked. 'I have a sextant. I have sight reduction tables. I have the Nautical Almanac. What I do not have, it turns out, is any ability to look up and know what I'm looking at.' Sextant's electronics — chartplotter, radar, and AIS — failed simultaneously after what he suspects was a lightning strike approximately sixty miles south of Bermuda. He retrieved his sextant, a polished brass instrument he had purchased in 2006 'because it looked magnificent on the nav station shelf,' and went on deck. 'I pointed it at the sky,' he said. 'I saw many stars. I did not know which ones they were. I tried to find Polaris but I wasn't sure which direction was north, which is, I realize now, rather the point of finding Polaris.' Sextant then attempted to use a star chart but found it 'inexplicably different from what the actual sky looks like,' a common complaint among first-time celestial navigators. 'The chart has neat little dots with names next to them. The sky has approximately ten billion dots with no labels whatsoever. The correlation between the two is not immediately obvious at 2 AM when you're trying not to sail to Africa.' The Coast Guard provided a waypoint via radio. Sextant arrived in Bermuda twenty hours later using dead reckoning and what he described as 'aggressive intuition.' He has since enrolled in a celestial navigation course and moved the sextant from the display shelf to the chart table.