We are so lucky in Marina di Ragusa as we have so many talent fellow cruisers and friends. This week Allan and Sue took us through the techniques of the "Sextant" and how to use one. All we can say is that those guys creating the amazing tables and all that math to ascertain where they were in the world using the sun and moon were truly amazing.

Firstly Allan brought along waxed paper, string, paper clips and pasta, yes pasta as the lead weight so we could, in true Blue Peter style, complete our own instrument to make angular measurements of the sun and find out where we were on the earth's surface. We then got home work and had to take our own readings with our Blue Peter style instrument the following day at 12.14.

After reading off the degrees on our own instruments we put this into a programme called Astron to give us the distance off.

My result put me within 23 nm of my actual location. I would be able to see Malta on passage from Marina di Ragusa which is very good.

Our handmade instruments are best in land though, so next was to take the Sextant to the beach and taking a reading. Some of the group were within 1 nm of our actual location, which is amazing amid the 74 million square nautical miles of our earth that faces the sun.

Photo: Clare bringing the sun to the horizon to take the reading from the West beach in Marina di Ragusa