Sailaway wrote:

It has just occurred to me that you could have lasiks done on just one
eye. That way you could read with one eye and see distance with the
other. Sailors that we know where she had always worn contacts, she
got that done, and doesn't have to wear glasses at all now.

"Ryk" wrote in message
.. .

I've got a Garmin GPS76 at the helm that provides all the
functionality I really need, backed up with a direct connection to the
PC running Fugawi at the nav station.

Unfortunately, I no longer have teenaged eyes and the combination of
small size, lack of contrast, rain, darkness, etc. can make it hard to
read at the most important moments. I'm at the point where I can still
read the phone book, but only in good light and probably getting a
little worse. I wear 1.75 dime store glasses to read in bed and
nothing at the computer screen.


About 6 or 7 years ago I was watching TV and ran across a show (maybe on
the History Channel ?) that described in part how the Army before the
start of W.W.II was woefully short on qualified candidates for flight
training. One reason for the shortage was due to a large number of
otherwise qualified potential candidates having poor eyesight, so the
Army hired a bunch of opthamologists to train the candidates to regain
good eyesight from refractive errors like myopia and presbyopia. They
showed films from the period where they were using all sorts of strange
machines to retrain the eyes. Some time after seeing that show I read a
description of the eye exercises for retraining refractive errors that
the Army opthamologists gave their candidates. Now I see a number of
*new* training systems for vision improvement for sale like the "See
Clearly Method" and others that base their methods on the original
Army/opthamologist methods, or the Bates method, or a combination of the
two. The Army method has been successful for a lot of people, and the
Bates system has also been successful for a lot of people. Some need
one, others need the other. Still other people may need a combo of the
two to be effective.
Bottom line is, if you are willing to spend the time and effort, you
can get a lot of correction. If though like me most of your refractive
error is from astigmatisms, be prepared to spend some serious work to
correct it. I started using the original Army methods when I first saw
them and stopped cold the progression of worsening, (which up till that
time meant about 1/4 diopter per year worsening on average) and have
since improved one whole diopter. If I had dedicated enough time and
energy to it I believe I would have improved my eyesight a lot more. I
hate wearing glasses so the time I spent working on my eyes has enabled
me to see good enough again to read without them. BTW, if you have
become farsighted, you will get pretty rapid improvement using the Army
methods - that seems to be by far the easiest to correct.
But thanks for reminding me. Passing the CG OUPV test means having
no more than 20/200 uncorrected, so now I'm going to dust off that
document and get back to working on my vision.