Stars are friends you can count on
I went out to a golf course by the sea the other night, to revisit some old friends — stars and planets we had used for navigation on the voyaging canoe Hokule'a.
I won't ever see in the same way the guideposts known as Vega or Keoe, Polaris or Hokupa'a, Mars, Arcturus or Hokule'a, the moon, Sirius or 'A'a, and a number of others that I can find in the sky but can't name.
I learned them during Hokule'a's recent voyage to the island of Nihoa, 150 miles northwest of Kaua'i.
Bruce Blankenfield navigated the Ka'ie'iewaho channel from O'ahu to Kaua'i, and Nainoa Thompson navigated from Kaua'i to Nihoa. Both are among the Polynesian Voyaging Society's veteran non-instrument navigators.
We used no Western instruments. There was no compass or global positioning system, no sextant or book of navigational tables. The power to radios was off. Our wristwatches were locked away in a box on deck. We had escort boats, but they were ordered to remain far behind us.
You feel a special relationship when you're wrapped around the bucking steering sweep after midnight, your complete focus on a clutch of lights in the heavens — the North Star or Hokupa'a directly above a line on a railing, Vega just off the point of the mast, the moon over the middle of the stern rail.
They are critically important — you need them to bring you to your destination. Read them wrong, or fail to pay attention to keeping the canoe in correct alignment under the starry sky, and your destination's not going to be there.
Rain squalls, high and low clouds, thin mists — they all work to obscure your navigational star. A star can simply get dimmer and dimmer until it's gone behind a mist so thin, you can't see it in the moonlight. You blink your eyes, shake your head, search the nearby areas to be sure a swell hasn't simply thrown you off course ... and then you look to another navigational star for guidance.
The best star or planet or the moon might be behind you, meaning you need to steer while facing the opposite way — a special challenge.
At one point between Ni'ihau and Nihoa while I was at the sweep, dense clouds and squalls shut out the entire sky. The moon was hidden, as was every star and planet. It was 10 or 11 p.m. The canoe was draped in darkness. I turned to Blankenfeld, who was serving as a watch captain as Thompson navigated.
"I've got no stars," I said to him.
"Let it come up a little. There," he said, and he continued quietly advising me on adjusting the course until the sky cleared. There were times when it was so dark, you couldn't see the ocean swells, but you could feel them as they moved the canoe. And you could feel the wind.
When the sky cleared, the North Star was over the mark on our starboard rail, precisely where it was supposed to be. Using winds, swells and whatever other cues he recognized, he had kept us perfectly on course through the darkness with no stellar signposts.
The stars, after all, are only one chapter in the book of the traditional navigator's tools. There's reading the surface of the ocean as well as watching the birds and feeling the wind and so much more.
I don't claim to know the stars. But I know a few.
And like the canoe itself, the people who prepared it for the sail, and the navigators and the crew on our voyage, they feel like friends.
