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.

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 I get on. It seems to have the potential to work quite well.

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 was pretty tired at this point so could have completely missed the point.

Anyway I asked her to ask them how they navigate: did they use the sun and stars and if so how? The answer I got back (again take into account the Chinese whispers involved) was that they don’t.  What they do is keep very good track of where they are in the tide cycle. The Delta has a 2m ish range between high/low waters, and so from that and the direction of current (which is easy to spot as there are these plants that drift around on it) they can work out which is towards the sea and which upriver. This is their main navigational tool, and when on an island they use blazes and “their nose” (not sure if that’s literal or means sense of direction) to find their way to the nearest water and then use water flow direction.

That would make some sense, but would result in a topological map not a cartographic, which actually would be more useful. Even with knowing the sun was east/west I found the many curves and bends of the river disconcerting but in terms of getting from A -> B irrelevant: what matters is the channel and whether you are going up it or down it…

Great stuff, thanks John. You can read more on his website.

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 the other detail that is coming in through our eyes. It is only by slowing our thoughts that our brains can actually start to see some of the things that our eyes see.

However aware we become of this, some details will always escape our eyes and mind. That is why walking in a group can be so rewarding.

After lunch we set out into the South Downs. A couple of hours into the walk my eyes were drawn to a stout beech stump, its sawn trunk covered in a thick moss felt. Using my fingers and then a stick, I began peeling away the moss. I wanted to reveal the rings of the dead tree and use the position of its heart to indicate direction. Stephen, who was standing a few feet away, politely pointed out that there was a near identical tree stump less than twenty feet away with no moss covering its rings. I had let myself become so drawn into one object that I had lost the wider picture. I walked over to the stump and had a bit of a laugh at myself. I had managed to blind myself to the bigger picture by studying the finer detail. Nature was once again gently mocking and reminding of the need for balance in everything.

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.