William G. Andersen wrote:
Amen, Jack.
If there are any stories, they will only point out that the person
didn't plan and shouldn't have been in that situation in the first
place. Electronics save the day, they don't ruin it.
I had a friend tell me of a several day seminar he attended on
celestial navigation and the use of a sextant. The best lesson he
learned is that he should use the beautiful wooden case for his
sextant to carry lots of extra AA batteries for his backup handheld
GPS.

Bill, also USCG Aux, San Diego, CA

"Jack Painter" wrote in message
news:lgG6c.9898$F91.8899@lakeread05...
"JR Minkel" wrote
Pop Science for first-person accounts of dramatically frustrating
battery failures in portable electronics--cell or sat phones, CBs,
laptops, GPS monitors, etc. We thought one category might be people
lost at sea because a battery died. To qualify, the battery must
have died of "natural" causes (as in, not exploding) in some
portable electronic device (as in, not the boat's battery) at an
extremely inopportune moment. If you have a story like that, please
email me directly at jrm@naswxxxorg (replace the triply repeated
letter with a period). My deadline is this Monday March 22nd, but
I'll take them up to a few days after. Please feel free to forward
this to friends and colleagues.

Horror-stories-at-sea because of hand held equipment battery-failure
is a total non-starter. The opposite is the rule, where fixed
equipment fails due to fire, immersion, main battery failure, engine
failure, etc., and the hand-held battery-powered equipment came to
the rescue.

The whole premise of the story-line appears to be frivoulous in
nature, to imply that anyone's primary safety or ability to
navigate, cruise/sail/fish, auto-tour, etc. was based on the sole
performance of a portable battery. That is unless you're trolling
for stories more likely found in the Enquirer than Popular Science..

Jack
USCG Auxiliary, Virginia Beach, VA

As a sailing electronics nutter, I have been repeatedly told by
fellow-posters to alt.uk.sailing NG that they don't rely on electronics, and
that the probability of power failure lurks in every boat, therefore they
only use traditional methods of navigation, sextants, rulers, etc., with
some electronics backup. GPS? Rumour has it that the Yanks are going to turn
it off any time soon! What complete bull***t!

Despite my inviting others to let us have stories of such catastrophies,
none have yet come forward, and I must conclude that you and I are right,
and everyone else (in the UK) is out of step!

Dennis.

Remove "nospam" from return address.