Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
wasn't any different to any of my landfalls lately; I just wished one of them could be down-
wind! Useless navigator that I am, I goofed up badly. I had miscalculated my deduced reck-
oning and found that I was still forty miles from landfall. I couldn't take any shots of the
sun, as it was cloudy all day. I used my radio direction finder and found that the battery
case had broken. After I wired it up, I received a bearing signal from Rarotonga airport,
no doubt. After I motor sailed the whole day I could not make out where Rarotonga was. I
thought I had overshot my mark, but soon found that I had taken the opposite bearing from
the RDF by mistake. I had been sailing in the wrong direction.
When you aim a radio direction finder at a navigation beacon, you will hear through the
head phones a certain identifying Morse signal - dash dash dot dot dash - for example.
There is a little compass mounted on this instrument which gives you a direction of where
this Morse signal is emanating from. When you turn away from the beacon's source, the
signal becomes weaker and weaker until you are ninety degrees from the signal. This is
the weakest you will hear the signal. Should you continue through this direction until you
are pointing it one hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction, you will hear the
signal just as strongly as if you were facing it as before! This is a rather long-winded de-
scription of what I did in error. One has to have a shrewd idea which direction the beacon
you want to find is in! I could not tell, as I had not seen land or an island in over three
weeks, and my deduced reckoning was shot to hell.
In the morning I saw no tell-tale clouds or any sign of an island, so I had gone about one
hundred and eighty degrees. It can be terribly confusing when all around you is just ocean,
and you are basically lost. Earlier that night I had later taken a moon shot with the sextant,
and this told me I was going in the wrong direction. An early morning sun shot confirmed
this error, and I spent the whole day motor sailing in light winds towards the readjusted
direction. By eight p.m. that night I was still fifteen miles off Rarotonga and had no wind.
I motor sailed all the next day and finally saw the first signs of Rarotonga. I had referred to
a book given to me by the famous New Zealand sailor, adventurer, and navigator, Dr. David
Lewis, whom I had met earlier in Hawaii. He was in his eighties then, with two plastic hips
and still riding a bicycle up a hill that I usually got off to push! He made a name for him-
self during his successful solo circumference of the Antarctic in the seventies in a little,
steel hard chine boat called “Ice Bird.” He also was known for the little navigation book he
wrote entitled We the Navigators, in which he described ways to navigate without modern
instruments.
There are tell-tale signs indicating the presence of islands if you know what to look for.
Above any island there are usually linear clouds that look like eyebrows, rising up on either
side, due to the hot air rising. Another sign was the color green under the base of clouds,
reflecting the green water color as it hovers over an island with a lagoon, or motu, in its in-
