She was not, by her own account, a master celestial navigator. She had used a sextant. She understood the principles. What she did not have was the confidence that comes from extensive practice, and she had a head injury that may have been affecting her cognition in ways she could not fully assess from the inside.
She began anyway.
The jury rig came first. She cut the broken spinnaker pole — the round, hollow fiberglass or aluminum spar that had been used to extend the spinnaker sail — to an appropriate length and stepped it as a makeshift mast. On this improvised spar she raised the storm jib, the only sail still intact. The storm jib is a small sail, designed to provide minimal sail area and maximum controllability in heavy weather. As the sole driving sail on a jury-rigged vessel, it would give her limited speed — two to three knots under good conditions — but it would give her steerage, the ability to point the yacht in a chosen direction.
She built a manual pump from materials she found aboard and used it to drain the flooded cabin, working at it for hours each day. The pump was essential: a half-flooded yacht sails poorly and stresses the hull in ways that can accelerate structural deterioration. Getting the water out was not a one-time task but a continuous one.
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## The Mathematics of the Sextant
Celestial navigation is one of the oldest navigational techniques that sailors have used in the open ocean. It predates the compass as a primary means of determining position, and it remained the primary offshore navigation tool from the age of exploration until the late twentieth century, when satellite-based systems made it largely redundant for practical passage-making while preserving it as a backup skill and a tradition.