Just back from a little research in the New Forest. While I gather my thoughts about all the natural clues to wayfinding that the Forest revealed I just thought I’d let you know about a great website from a different part of our island. Stonesofwonder.com is a very informative guide to the prehistoric sites of stone monuments of Scotland, all arranged with celestial observation or inspiration in mind. There is information about the location of sites like  Ardachearanbeg, Clochkell, Cultoon, Finlaggan, Drumtroddan, Clava, Callanish and Stillaig, to name a few, and details about their relationship with moments like the equinoxes, solstices and lunar standstills. The website is well worth a visit, and much more accesible than the real things at this time of year.

The following is an excerpt from the excellent website,

Hōkūle‘a Worldwide Voyage

Hōkūle‘a deep sea navigator and captain Bruce Blankenfeld shares with new voyagers some of the knowledge passed on to him by master navigator Mau Piailug.

Using Papa Mau’s star compass, he teaches some of the basics of traditional Polynesian wayfinding.

Watch the navigation lesson.

I’ve been experimenting over the past few nights, as we approached the full moon, with a technique that I’ve been working on that combines two others. It is possible to find direction using the moon in a number of ways: by its shadow, by using a tangent to its crescent and by understanding its phase relationship with the sun.

A very indirect method, that I have not come across anywhere else before, is to use moonlight reflected off cloud edges to reveal the direction of the moon, then to use an understanding of its phase to determine direction. Like a lot of methods for finding your way using the moon, it sounds a lot more complicated than it actually is, but it does still come with some inbuilt errors. I will try to persevere and experiment with this method some more over the coming months and let you know how…

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Credit: John Pahl

My friend, John, who certainly qualifies as working in one of the more unusual fields, has just returned from an unusual work trip to Venezuela and the Orinoco Delta. John is also an alumni of my natural navigation school and a reporter in the sailing world, see Captain JP’s Log. I asked him to do me a favour, to keep his senses alert and to see if he could glean any useful wayfinding scraps whilst out there. He did well, very well. Here is an excerpt from his ‘report’!

I tried to find out how the Warao people who live in the delta navigate and as I speak no Spanish and they no English (they have their own language and actually not all of them speak Spanish) I had to use our Venezuela guide as a translator. However English was her fourth language after Spanish, Italian and German and she…

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I ran a small private course yesterday and enjoyed a wonderfully ironic moment. It was almost embarrassing.

The first half of the day was spent indoors studying the theory, looking at photographs and playing with celestial models. One of the points I am always keen to make is about the relationship between the uses of our senses and wayfinding. Sight is so often under-rated because its use is so immediately obvious, but we rarely acknowledge how much detail is allowed to escape. For example, we have evolved to identify things by shape much more readily than by colour or shade. Our brains tend to identify an object as a tree, ie. not a threat, and then move on to processing other information without noticing the subtle differences in shades of the leaves at all. Sometimes it pays to rein it in, to force it to focus and to analyse some of…

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I was on a night navigation exercise the other night – not to be confused with a ’stumbling around in the dark effing and blinding’ exercise. I downloaded the photos this morning and this one reminded me of the importance of sound and touch, especially at night. The paths and animal trails were slightly lower than the surrounding grass and had been sheltered from the thawing effects of the day’s warmer breezes. They had all retained their hard frost, unlike the grass which had softened.

It was possible to tell if I strayed off a path without any light at all, by the feel of the soft grass against the icy crunch of the path, ie. by using hearing and touch. A lot of wayfinding revolves around sight, but it adds greatly to the satisfaction when the other senses come into play.