The Origins of Dominique Prinet’s Navigation Texts

Dominique Prinet, the author of  excellent course texts and exercises on Celestial and Coastal navigation, shares his reminiscences of the origins of his books:

My passion for sailing was born in Tanzania (East Africa), at the yacht club of Dar es Salam. With my little plywood boat, I was in paradise: the weather is perfect year-round, the sun shines nicely every-day, a gentle breeze blows regularly from 9 AM to 5 PM, and the beaches are spectacular, bordered by palm trees and coconut trees. The people are wonderful.

I was there for five years under a World Bank program, to turn around and manage the national airline. Electricity and telephones had been mostly cutoff, and the flights of the day were announced by the local radio every morning depending on how much cash there was that day to buy fuel. When the job was done, I returned to Canada as crew on a sailboat from Portugal to Guadeloupe, navigating by sextant.

It had been such a wonderful experience that I decided to help others reach that state of felicity. For 15 years, in Vancouver, I taught sailing (and power boating) to Sail Canada students, on land and at sea, from Basic to Offshore. I was also an Instructor Evaluator.

The Coastal and Celestial Navigation course books are the notes that I put together for these students and developed with them over the years; the exercises are those they had to do to prepare for the tests. The books are well tried and tested, and they work.