A colleague who has some sort of yacht masters certificate (2 year course?, I know nothing about sailing) tells me the GPS "issue" was more or less settled in sailing about 10 years ago, and now they just use it.
I suppose that the sailing community doesn't have the huge respect for rules, many of them unbelievably obscure, which aviation generally has. It doesn't have the problem of everybody living in mortal fear of the CAA. This is what creates the present ridiculous atmosphere where some PPL reads some bull in some magazine about GPS being illegal for primary navigation or whatever, and gets really worried about it, starts to hide the GPS in a bag and pretend that it is used as a backup only, switched off until needed, etc.