Just sharing info with anyone thinking about getting a second hand sextant.
Fist of all buy "The sextant handbook" by Bruce Bauer(I bought it afterwards!)
After watching ebay for about two months I finally got what I was after -for a little over £100-a Japanese MAC sextant in very good condition-(read Tamaya for MAC-its the same sextant.)
There are clearly 3 types of sextant buyers on ebay-the interested sailor;the scientific instrument collector/dealer and last but unfortunately not least the "Collectable"collector/dealer.
As a result anything from the UK over about 20 yrs old appears to attract non sailors and prices of classic German and English sextants get silly-even saw one with bits missing go for well over £100! On the other hand Russian(German copies);East German(Freiberger/Zeiss)and Japanese keep a sensible second hand price.
One other point is that the market in the US is not as bouyant and is well worth watching-it costs about £15 surface mail to ship plus aprox.20% UK duty and VAT.
Oh yes and that means you can get a brand new Davis plastic mk.15 shipped to you from Celestaire the US including tax and airfreight for aprox.£100
Phil

Hi Phil, thanks for the info. Are you planning to use your sextant in anger? I must confess that, having done the ocean nav theory, and learned to take passable sights, and even work them out and get a result (!) we've got lazy and left our sextant in its box gathering dust, as the GPS seems to make all that effort rather redundant! I suppose if and when we do cross the Atlantic we'll take it with us as a battery-proof back-up. Are you planning something similar?

Newton ascribed the heavenly motions he mathematically described, to the Celestial Clockmaker-God.
Its just that the GPS clockmaker is a certain George W. Bush!!!!!-those few words of small print on our GPS instruction manuals which we all forget-"this is a military system which can be turned off at anytime---" -and yes I have a fixed and a hand held GPS but I enjoy traditional "self sufficient" navigation-all be it with modern versions of traditional navigation aids-logs,depth sounders etc.
Problem is is that it is just so easy with the GPS to press the buttons-I do it all the time if its switched on!
Finally some food for thought-when a Trident sub surfaces at the mouth of Firth of Clyde a secure weapons platform becomes totally vunerable to an enemies smart bomb using GPS which is why the sub appears to jam GPS reception as it travels up to Faslane. On a regular basis as these subs passed between the south end of Bute where I lived and Little Cumbrae my GPS used to go haywire and the west coast of Scotland is full of subs playing!
So how reliable is GPS not forgeting what happens if we input a wrong waypoint etc.
Phil

Ah yes, submarines. Fortunately we don't see much of them (or many other warships come to that) on the East Coast as the water is too shallow for them. I remember being badly scared by a sub on a night passage in the Channel once, because we are so unusued to seeing them it took me a while to work out what it was. The hull was awash and I could not work out why a Martello tower was coming towards me at high speed. They seem to be a hazard to navigation, with or without the effect they might have on GPS. I must confess that these days I navigate almost entirely by GPS, but even so I am always pleased on a long passage to see a buoy or some other landmark which confirms it is telling the truth! What system do you use to work out your sextant sights?

The sextant is a long story-as a teenager when my sailing was in a dingy and canoe-I would buy an almanac for my birthday and practise navigation problems-at the time this linked in with my maths and physics home work-vector triangles/Newtons Laws etc-use of sin,cos cosec cot tables etc.Used my radio to find RDF beacons etc.Always wanted a sextant but by the time I had a big boat Decca and GPS was here so sextant has only just arrived. As for tables-The concise reduction tables in the Nautical Almanac(US Edition at £11 from Amazon-not £30 from HMSO)-dead easy if you print out sheet they include where you fill in necessary detail and add and subtract as necessary-but as I said was always good at maths.As for a book the one by Ms.Blewitt-my 1990 ed. has Prince Charles on the front using his Simex(MAC)(Tamaya)Ms. Blewitt was of course Navigator on the Queens yacht-The Bloodhound .
Phil

Hi Phil, thanks for the very good tip on buying the American tables!