Two retired sea navigators, one living in Elgin and the other in Aberdeen, decided to meet up one day for a chat about old times. They both set off at the exact same time towards each other. The taller navigator travelled by car whilst the shorter ex-pirate navigator walked slowly east. They met up after under an hour on the A96 and chatted at length about the good old days before those new-fangled GPSs – the good old days when just a decent watch, a map and a sextant was all that was needed to sail the seven seas.
They placed a cache at the spot where they met and calculated that location by using their sextants to observe the Sun and the Moon. However, this sextant-derived position was only accurate to about a nautical mile due to a poor horizon that day. Realising that this was not accurate enough for modern day use, they quickly did some other navigation calculations to aid keen geocachers find the actual cache location.
They agreed that their homes were precisely 60.5359 nautical miles apart and that the tall navigator had traveled at an average speed of 71.7291 knots whilst the ex-pirate navigator had only averaged 3.9408 knots.
They believe that anyone, even pilots, should be able to solve such a straightforward navigation problem.
