It is kind of strange to me to make navigation tools harder to use or to intentionally put them in places where they cannot provide the most efficient and immediate information.

Maybe the old timers also intentionally scuffed up their sextant sights and loosened the mirror and filter wrist pins so that they didn't get too reliant on their tools?

If you were Eisberg, you would simply break everything on the first night out and be done with it.

For us, when we need the radar, we want the radar information as fresh and close at hand as possible. Just too difficult in bad weather or fog to match up running lights, engine sounds or horns with radar targets when your focus and perspective is changing modality constantly. Especially late at night and in shipping lanes.

We simply don't have the problem or fears you describe. We also took a lightning strike in the San Blas that turned most everything to molten metal, but simply forged on for a while with a HH GPS until we could make repairs.

How about the depth sounder? That below too? That was the instrument we were really uncomfortable not having. Luckily, we had a handheld sounder that I could take readings off the stern step. And we are a catamaran, so depth is not as big of a deal. However, the depth sounder is our lazy thing - we are just so used to having that number in front of us all the time that when it is missing, we are uncomfortable.

Mark