> I sincerely hope you do not plan to acutally navigate like this.

I have in fact. Works pretty well by and large.

At either sun rise, or sun set, you don't need this. You can see the sun, see where it is, and roughly (remember I'm saying roughly) know where north is. But at 10:00 it's a lot tougher. That's when the watch dial works. And it does in fact work quite well. Even on cloudy days it works because you almost never cannot find the hot spot in the clouds, even if the shadows are weak. Standard time and such is not that important because we are not talking about precise location of magnetic or rotational south, just the general direction of south. So that you head generally in whatever direction you want, instead of the instinctive circling that humans do when proceeding blindly.

Scratching in the sand is fine, but only if you carry the beach with you as you walk or paddle. Not to mention trying to line up a line down at your feet with the sun up above your head.