About 35 years ago I had a job on a ship that placed the buoys that mark ship channels. This was before GPS and before satellite navigation. The most accurate means of positioning available to us was observing horizontal sextant angles from known charted objects on shore like smoke stacks and radio antennas and occasionally a lighthouse.
If we knew all the angles and distances of the triangle defined by the two objects and the assigned position, we could calculate the direction and rate of positive gradient, so that if the observed angle was smaller than the desired angle, we'd know which direction and how far we had to go to get the desired angle. We used hand drawn grids to combine the solutions from simultaneously observed angles to produce very accurate and very quick fixes of our position.
The sextant angles were much more accurate than lines of position using the ship's gyrocompass because those lines of position were accurate only to a half degree. Depending on the distances and angles involved, a half degree could induce an error almost as wide as the channel we were marking, which was obviously unacceptable. With horizontal sextant angles, however, we could measure degrees, minutes, and tenths of minutes. When conditions were right, we could often position a buoy within 5 yards of its assigned position at the moment we let it go (unfortunately, the sinker could drift outside a circle whose radius equaled the depth of the water as it sank to the bottom, but that's another problem).
From time to time, the objects we wanted to use for our positioning would be obscured by haze or background lights, and we'd have to find other suitable objects ashore to use as our reference points.
Once in a while, if there was nothing suitable available we'd joke around and say things like, "I've got 35 degrees, 14. 2 minutes from the large fluffy cloud to the seagull on the end of the refinery pier."
It was funny because we all knew that a precise measurement to an imprecise object was meaningless.
Not sure everyone on this board would get that joke.