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## Navigating by Hand in an Age Before GPS
It is worth pausing on what was available for navigation in 1983, because the contrast with the present makes the achievement clearer.
GPS — the Global Positioning System — had been in development since the 1970s, but in October 1983 it was not operational as a civilian system. The first GPS satellite had been launched in 1978; the constellation required to provide global coverage was not complete until 1993; civilian handheld GPS receivers did not become affordable and widely available until the mid-1990s. In October 1983, a sailor in the mid-Pacific had no access to GPS.
The alternative electronic navigation systems available in 1983 included Loran-C, which provided coverage along coastal North America and in some oceanic regions, but whose coverage in the mid-Pacific was limited. Omega navigation provided global coverage but with accuracy measured in miles rather than feet, requiring specialized receivers and expertise. Satellite navigation systems called Transit (or Navy Navigation Satellite System) were available on some vessels, primarily commercial and naval, but were not standard equipment on recreational yacht deliveries.
The Hazana’s electronic navigation equipment, whatever it was, was destroyed or lost in the capsize. What remained was the sextant, the watch, the almanac, and the charts.
The Polynesian wayfinders who first settled Hawaii — centuries before European contact, centuries before the sextant was invented — navigated using wave patterns, stars, cloud formations over islands, and the behavior of birds and ocean life. Their techniques were not inferior to celestial navigation; they were different methods developed for different instruments and different training traditions. Ashcraft used the sextant and almanac tradition of European maritime navigation, one of the most precisely developed navigational systems in human history, in the form available to a sailor in 1983: the same form used by Joshua Slocum when he circumnavigated alone in the 1890s, by sailors through two world wars, by every offshore sailor until GPS made the sextant functionally optional.