I did all my navigation with a bearing compass and paper plots. I never went offshore far enough to need celestial. DR was done relative to the last plot or the last buoy passed, using compass and the knot-log with a guesstimate thrown in for currents. At night in fog it was a total crap shoot.

Most of the time we didn't know where we were and unless we were near reefs we didn't care much. I remember my motto used to be "We don't need to know where we are, but we do need to know where we're not".

Now with affordable radar and CPs and AIS, navigation is like a video game. Much easier and better, so long as judgment and actual observation/correlation is still factored in. Unfortunately, it makes some skippers overconfident.