Sea Control - Sea Control 596: The Last Navigator with Steve Thomas

Episode Date: February 5, 2026

Links: Steve’s website “The Last Navigator: A Young Man, and Ancient Mariner, the Secrets of the Sea” The Last Navigator documentarySteve’s lecture at the US Naval Academy

Welcome aboard Sea Control fans, this is Jay, my guest today is Steve Thomas, and we're going to talk about his newly published revised edition of his book from the 1980s called The Last Navigator. Steve, I have a feeling most of our listeners are actually familiar with you, but just maybe not in the nautical maritime context so before we get into discussion could you tell us a little bit more about yourself please well most people know me as host of this old house on public television so i was on this old house from 1989 to yeah 89 to 2004 and then i did save our history on the history channel and then uh renovation nation with steve thomas on planet green

discoveries planet green so i had a long uh run in television then i worked with habitat for humanity international for five years and then went back into private practice as a uh you know builder here in mid-coast of maine i live on the coast of maine and uh now i'm kind of backing off a little bit at uh in my 70s you know i don't think i need to stand out there in the middle of the winter wearing a tool belt and so the last navigator project was actually what got me into this old house and the way that happened was you know i had i always bought renovated and sold houses that's just my dad used to do it and you know when i got out of college i bought a house renovated and sold it it's just what you do you know i didn't i didn't have any i didn't have any

common sense you know i just buy these old wrecks and pick them up fix them up and sell them and um but i was i got deeply interested in traditional micronesian navigation uh when i raced out to hawaii right after college so raced out to hawaii sailed the boat back and i read a book called we the navigators by david lewis which is an excellent he was a medical doctor from new zealand said and he he uh bought himself a big motor sailor very good sailor he uh circumnavigated antarctica alone you know so he's he was in the net he was in national geographic quite a bit he's a tough guy and he chronicled what was left of polynesian navigation uh this was in the 70s and i read the book as i was learning how to use this accident and site reduction tables and i thought

wow these guys are making these long ocean passages using stars waves and birds no charts no instruments traditionally no compass and they were able to make landfall you know with adequate accuracy so I eventually got the notion that maybe I could go study these techniques and learn Micronesian navigation. And, you know, I really got the bone in my teeth and was able to do that. Went to Sadowall Island, studied with Mount Piala in 83, then again in 84, wrote the book,

which was first published in 87. And then I went back and did a documentary film, also for PBS, Channel 4 Britain, PBS in the U.S. and uh that was based out of wgbh in boston which also produces this old house and uh our publicist called up one day and she said hey i want to talk about publicity for the last navigator and she said what are you doing anyway i said i'm renovating my attic you know that's so i didn't know you did that kind of stuff i said yeah and she said well you should talk to the guys at this old house they're looking for a new host so long story short out of 400 yeah 412 applicants they

said you know you got the job so that's how i ended up being hosted this old house so many years later um i still am in touch with some of the guys that were kids on saddlewall island and one of them rafi who we were talking about before you hit record but you really need to go back and change the pseudonyms to the real names and we've got a new orthography that we you know i made up my own orthography it was a fanatic orthography that was perfectly workman like but they wanted the satellite said look this is like a moment in history uh when the old the elders were still alive still teaching but they knew they were going to die all right and And they saw this Western navigator.

They used to call me the American Palou. And, you know, with a tape recorder and cameras and a notebook and typewriter, they decided that if they didn't teach me, their knowledge was going to die. So we went back with, you know, Rafi's help, and I changed all the names back to the original names and discarded the pseudonyms, redid the orthography. went back and checked a lot of the they had questions about uh is this or that accurate and i had full documentation of everything tape you know i tape recorded all my conversations transcribed them translated them took notes had a big series of notes uh in systems notebooks and a journal card file so i could go back and find the exact reference to whatever it was that they were questioning so this new edition is fully verified and fully accepted by the saddow

as the bible uh but it also has a lot of photographs in it because i took 5 000 photographs when i was on the on the island and you know with new printing technology you can you can you can use a lot of photographs at no cost penalty right the photos are really really make it come alive and it's a tribute to the you know to the elders who trusted me and rafabi with the knowledge i mean one guy um was who taught us the language of light which is a secret language of conflict resolution we were his last two students and then he died so you know it was quite a an honor to be taught the stuff but also the responsibility to make sure that it lives on is something i'm very conscious of yeah and that is the new edition of the last

navigator it is there there is so much i just finished that a couple days ago there is so much to unpack and just what you said and just going through the book um i guess if a few things that just came to mind i was going through how did you go about you you talked about a little bit in the book, but so you, how did, how did you go about getting, getting in touch with the folk? You became interested in this and just as a sort of a, or, you know, other, other adventures out there and folks into this, into the various anthropology and navigation, everything else. How did you go about getting in touch with these people at the time and see if they would take you on? What was your, what was your kind of method for that? Well, this of course was before cell phones,

sat phones email right or any kind of electronic communication in fact yap state where saddlewell island is located didn't even have a satellite uplink so you couldn't call the the state right um so i you know i read i sat in the museum peabody museum of salem library for you know four months and read everything that was available it was a very good library for pacific collection and i read everything that was available contacted some of the western scholars who were still uh you know had written about it mostly after the war you know they were out in the marshals where you were when you were in the coast guard uh you said you weren't in the carolines but you know they were out there to to do the very first american ethnographic studies and

And, you know, they took an interest in what I wanted to do, knowing that I was a Western navigator and having seen personally these, you know, these navigation techniques. So, you know, they introduced me to wherever they could. And I eventually got in touch with Ben Finney, who was the he was one of the drivers behind the Hokulea project and also chairman of the anthropology department at University of Hawaii. and I called him up and he said yeah you should talk to this guy named Sam Lowe who's in Boston and he he just shot a film for PBS in the Pacific and on Saddlewall Island so I called Sam and he said yeah I just got back we just wrapped up the filming part of it and I started working on because I had I you know I understood the navigation fairly well at that point from an academic standpoint, having read all the literature.

So I was an advisor to the film. And then through Sam's contacts and others, I was able to get research visas. But I didn't know if Pialik was going to take me on as a, you know, I had no idea until I got to Yap. Right, right. It was a shot in the dark. Yes.

So the short answer to your question is, you know, I didn't. Right, right. so it's yeah it's it's good to hear yeah yeah yeah i mean you get on the plane and you go there right right try to make it happen yeah and and you managed i think there's there's a lot of lessons in the book for that for just making that happen how you manage to show up into this culture as an obvious foreigner and and get to accept it variously when you i'll skip around a bit when you when you went back you said that people did realize that there were this was a dying art at the time I mean, the very title of the book, The Last Navigator.

Do you see any in the area of resurgence, any other interest among any of the young people? That's a really good question. There are, well, Rathopee, who is in the book, pictured in the book. I shot a picture of him when he graduated from high school. Yeah. And I shot a picture of the prettiest girl in the class. And when he saw the two pictures, he said, that's my wife. he said how did you know i said i didn't she was the prettiest girl in the class

um so he's deeply interested in uh traditional all traditional lore so there's some of that uh and then there's the navigation is still practiced i don't know to what extent the problem is it's an integrated system and as a navy you know as a as a dod navy guy you know this very well uh you need canoes sailing you know large outrigger sailing canoes in order to practice pelagic non-instrumental navigation and uh to main build and maintain large pelagic um uh outrigger sailing canoes you need a crew and you need a sand nap or master boat builder and so on you know all this this whole integrated skill set um and and the problem with sending the kids off to high school early on and this

came after the war was they don't learn the traditional skills right so that's that circle virtuous circle if you will is is broken not completely broken but you know it's severely challenged yeah and you know with japanese pongas which are really robust boats and outboard motors which are pretty reliable these days you know they will take off with enough fuel and they'll make some of these passages using pongas yeah you know just like you see in the caribbean sure yeah you know they're big you know they're they're big boats these pongas are big robust boats so i don't know how much gps has made inroads but you know with you know small very reliable very accurate uh battery operated gps units uh and the new technology of outward motors

and pongas and so on um and with a little money to make it all work you know be able to buy fuel and stuff you know you can see that it's just a matter of time right right you know the the society that overall society the structure of the society the structure of the the arts that were required to make all this stuff happen, boat building and so on. That's just not, that's not there. So that part of it, I mean, it's just, Pialik knew, I mean, part of the source

of his rage and anguish was that he could, he understood the power of the West. This was in the 70s and 80s. Yeah, you pick that up in the book, some of their complete, yes, it's obvious there. They have a very ambiguous relationship, I think, to the best. Yeah. And that has come to pass. I mean, now there's a Starlink unit on Saddlewell Island. So, you know, can it be kept alive in some vestigial way? I think so.

um you know certainly the this book the last navigator and a a archive book that we are just wrapping up now uh that pulls all the traditional material out of my archives at the university of hawaii um will help yeah i mean all this stuff from the the masters um uh calling the breadfruit and calling the octopus and chance to call the floating logs under which fish swarm. And, you know, there was this whole spiritual aspect and metaphysical aspect of navigation. Navigation spilled into the metaphysical.

The physical spilled into the metaphysical, and it was all, you know, an integrated system. So, you know, by the second year I was there, 84, All the old guys said, you got to write this down, you know. Right. You know, Steve, come over to my hut and, you know, bring her to every quarter. Yeah. Because they knew.

They knew they were going to die and they knew it was going to disappear. Yeah. I know. It breaks your heart. It does. It was sad reading it and knowing that it was written 40 years ago. And, yes, they're aware of the time. I mean, I'm doing the audio version of it now at a studio here in Camden, Maine, with a friend of mine, a guy I've worked with on a bunch of different film projects.

And, you know, there is a film, The Last Navigator, that PBS did. You know, he said, this is just heartbreaking. I mean, I've read the book. I've known you for 20 years. You know, I know as much as anybody does about you, but this just breaks my heart. It really does. it's so it's so poignant even now all these years later yeah that is um how did i'll again skipping around a bit how did you go about uh the language you know some of the folks spoke

english but you learned quite a bit of their of the language there which has got got to be challenging there too it was a challenge yeah there's no there's you can't take a berlitz course right right so i'm thinking so was that just was that this is before google translate exactly so yes there are so many things like that when i'm going with yeah yeah pre-internet how did they yeah well i had a woolly iron from the university of hawaii i got a printout remember those dot matrix printers sure gigantic you know roll of paper with a little perforation So they had some guy, I can't remember his name right now, had done a woolly iron English dictionary.

Okay. It was in a gigantic printout, big, giant book. And so I studied that. And in the mornings, I would study my woolly iron grammar. And in the afternoons, I would work with one of the Sado Alize guys who spoke English, and he would help me translate that into Sado Alize. So by the second year, so 84, I actually spoke Saddleways fairly well, you know, for a white guy. Yeah.

And, you know, enough to converse if they didn't talk too fast. So once they got going, you know, they were talking too fast. Right, right, right. So that was key, being able to speak some of the language and be conversant. uh but the other thing that was key was that i knew how to do stuff so when i first and i document this in the book uh urupa who is uh pialik's brother said do you know how to i brought a bunch of sailcloth food sailmakers gave me like 10 rolls of sailcloth and said take this down they'll they'll really like this well they loved it they flipped out and and urupa said

do you know how to use this hand crank sewing machine that my brother bought on Yap I said yeah I do because I'd worked in a sail loft he said okay make a sail I said well okay and I'd never made a Micronesian outrigger sail but I'd

looked at the footage the film footage and thought you know these sails are too baggy they got to be cut flatter and they need a down haul they need an out haul you got to be able to control the sail shape as the wind changes velocity So I did all that stuff.

And all the old men came by and they shook their heads and they said, we don't make sales this way. The next old guy would come by and say, yeah, we've never made a – never in the history of navigation on Saddlewell Island has anybody ever made a sale this way. So a little boy came by and said, you know, it's not the way we make sales. And I was getting a little nervous because, you know, my reputation was on the line. So we go off. I finish the sail. You know, me and the other guys, mostly, you know, young men, we finish the sail. We rig it up.

And we go off. So this was like a Saturday. It's on a Monday. We go fish Willigee Reef because the tuna were running. And Utapau wants to catch up with the rest of the other canoes. so he's driving this boat she was a fast boat her name was son tory after the whiskey yeah after the whiskey so she he was driving a really downwind so she was and they fly these boats fly and i said what about we you know that the the clue was ripping out so we got to drop the sail and he

says no no no let's got to catch up with the other the rest of the guys so by that time the clue you pulled out he was looking at me like i told you that we don't make sails this way so we dropped it and i fixed it and uh you know we re hoisted the sail and on the on the way home from fishing it was the wind had moderated we were sailing upwind which is the true test right because you're sailing to windward we killed the other canoes i mean we were two miles ahead of them right so i was a hero right so the moral of the story is i was not just a useless anthropologist that showed up cameras and a tape recorder i could actually do stuff you know i could build stuff and i could repair stuff you have a chainsaw there's a good story about the chainsaw there yeah only only

only steve can use the chainsaw so yeah yeah well nobody else had to use it right you know i mean they didn't know how to mix the gas they didn't know how to adjust the chain sure they didn't know how to sharpen the chain and all that stuff you know so yeah i was yeah i was chainsaw man so yeah there's a lot of good there there are so many sort of lessons in the book even if one isn't into this this topic i think there's just a lot of good stuff to learn from that from uh just like that how to how to you know move move about a culture very different from your own did you have any did you have any you called yourself sort of an anthropologist there on time did you have any training in anthropology anything like that no my specialty

was i mean i was a i was a philosophy major and i was headed off to grad school i studied wittgenstein i ended up started with sart like all young philosophers and ended up with wittgenstein and bertrand russell so go figure uh but uh you know back then so this was i graduated from college in 74 i mean there was no work for a phd philosopher or phd anthropologist sure um and my advisor said there's no work so forget it and you're going to hate it anyway you're going to hate academia you know at that level so what else do you want to do i said well you know i'm a sailor i want to you know go off on a voyage you said good go get out of here so that's what i did and you know to back then and you experienced some of this i'm sure you know when you were

banging around the pacific i mean if you were going to get along with you know cultures anywhere you had to kind of be an anthropologist you know not not in a stunning the bug kind of way but you know you get along yeah it's time to have dinner it turns out to be dog well you know you eat a dog or eat little birds you know it's like eating your parakeet yeah you just kind of are open to new experiences right and not so prissy i mean we you know you guys know this who study warfare and asymmetrical warfare i mean americans are spoiled they're spoiled and they're pretty soft i have to say yeah i think yeah yeah we touched on this uh a little bit before the interview came. So you and I were, for the listeners, Steve and I were virtually

introduced by a mutual friend who was one of the SIMSEC OGs, Claude Bearby, doctor, retired commander. I know you gave a talk on the book and your experience to the midshipmen at the Naval Academy. And I'm going to put that link up here too, so folks can watch that. But we just touched on the asymmetric part there that I think is something you experienced or were thinking about. Other things from this book, aside from just like the interesting tactical navigation stuff that might be of interest, of learning to military, maritime, naval professionals? That's a great question. So I was invited to give a keynote talk to the IEEE, the Institute for Electronic and Electrical Engineers, that do all the standards for all the electronic stuff all over the world. And they have various, you know, subdivisions, I guess, and one of them is inertial navigation.

And having been on a nuclear submarine myself, this was way before 9-11. Yeah, I was on the Wyoming in Dry Dock, and then I was on the Nebraska at sea. Yeah, that was really cool. That was so awesome. That was so cool. I mean, you can't do that anymore. Back then, you could still, if you had an in, you could do it. But so the inertial navigation unit is seeking to put inertial navigation on a chip.

When I was on the Nebraska, it was a room with a gigantic gyroscope in it and a bunch of computers. And they're trying to put it on a chip. So, you know, they were really interested in how does somebody navigate using stars, waves, and birds? They're, you know, a virtual, you know, these navigators are virtual inertial navigators. So is there any, you know, is there any way you can translate that using AI or is there any way that we can, you know, extract some insight into being able to, I mean, obviously, GPS can be interrupted. Any electronic signal can be jammed, interrupted, redirected, whatever. And so if you're self-contained on a vessel or a drone or an underwater sea drone or whatever, you know, it's a great advantage. So it's an analog for, it's an analog.

So they were really interested in non-instrumental navigation. And was there any carryover? I mean, intellectually, they were interested, but also, you know, obviously, you know, they wanted to know if there was any kind of carryover. Interesting. That's cool. Yeah. And then the, again, you want to talk about, I mean, it was reading about the toughness you mentioned, just some of the things these folks did as part of their everyday life. Just, I'll let, again, I'll let the readers look into that, but just some of what it takes to take an outrigger canoe from island to island there. What's that like for the crew on there? How many folks are on the boat?

And how long are they out, you know, beyond sight of land? Minimum of six. You know, you could do it with four, but you really have to work hard. Because, you know, when you tack these vessels, the outrigger is always to windward. And then you've got a steering paddle that's obviously on the stern. And it's a mast and then two booms. So it's sort of like a Latine rig in a way. um and to tack you pick up the whole rig using the mass as a crane and there's a bunch of photos

in the book so it'll be you know obvious and and you crane the whole thing around uh and the mast i mean the it's an iramuan the man's timber and the output which is the woman's timber so the iramuan sets in a socket in the new bow and you shift the steering paddle back to the new stern and off you go in the other direction so you know it's physical so you need one two three or like four guys to do this so six is like minimum and all the way up to you know if you're on a passage carrying passengers 12 people yeah um so the typical voyage they make is from sadawal to pigueta which is called on the charts west fayu and that's typically a reach because you've northeast trade winds so the north the trades vary from northeast to east and sometimes south

southeast so it's typically a reach going up and a close reach coming back uh and so it's a quick passage of eight ten hours depending on the wind so that's a one-day passage if you're going to peak which is a turtle island small turtle island that's dead to windward it took us two and a half days to get to peak and you know it was squally weather kind of inclement weather um and that was a long upwind hall right so and you know you don't there's no down below right right yeah there's no nav station all right you know there's no uh there's no head yeah yeah and you just and most guys don't have any foul weather gear or anything else right and right you get used to being in it's the tropics so it's hot yeah and you get used to your body just gets used

to sloughing off heat because it's so hot and then you got a squall line coming through and it rains and the wind blows and you know my teeth are chattering yeah finally finally and one thing that i document one one old guy you know had an old tattered foul weather top and he finally pulled it out because he was freezing oh fine so i pulled out my i pulled out my because i was freezing so they're tough but you didn't want to be the first one to do that no yeah exactly no you know uh and they they said are you a you know they would say i didn't rub it in your face but you know the question is are you a man and you're in your feet took your meat which is your physical person or are you a woman you know and so or a child yeah they pride themselves on being

really tough and yeah they are yeah yeah yeah you get you get that impression one guy we were spearfishing the reef and uh there are these white tip sharks that are really vicious i mean they'll just attack there's black tips which are fairly they'll only attack and provoke and then the white tips will just attack and uh he was coming up with a fish you know they they died pretty deep you know way deeper than i can dive just holding their breath that's what in addition to the sailing they're also like stopping to jump in the water and fish for things quite it's very physical oh yeah on there yeah and he got he got hit by a white tip that took a probably a 16 inch gash out of his calf you know all the way to the bone bleeding like a stuck pig i mean

and so we obviously hauled him into the medic there is a medic and the medic said can you uh you know a native guy and he said can you do you know how to do any of this stuff can you help me i said sure and so we sewed him up you know with internal stitches it was a gash yeah and then finally external stitches i mean you could reach your fingers you know picture reaching your fingers all the way down into the into this wound you know he had antibiotics so i gave him of course antibiotics two weeks later he was fishing again right yeah it was like okay was he in pain yeah did it stop him no no that's they are they're they're are tough yeah yeah like i said i think there are so many sort of lessons for i guess like foreign area officers so anybody like that in the

uh if you're going into other cultures just a lot of stuff to learn that i i think yeah lessons from this book from a someone who wasn't trained particularly in it but you managed to get along well um and then i'll get back a little bit of technical stuff which i'm still really trying to dig my small brain into the back of this uh reissue has really i get are we calling them charts um you have a lot of stuff on the actual navigation um how they did things how the islands looked or or that could you go into that just a little bit for sure we've got quartermasters and stuff listening it so this may be cool for them so there's you know there's the story the narrative in the book itself but the meat of the book really in the meat of

you know the reason i was there was to learn in a very detailed way um as a navigator how you use stars waves and birds to get from point a to point a to b And there are a number of subsystems that all interact that are part of non-instrumental navigation. So any navigation system has to satisfy three requirements, right? You need to have a course to your objective. I mean, now GPS for us has changed the whole game. But, you know, for you old guys out there, you know, you would go to the nav station and you would pull out your chart and you would pull out your parallel rules and, you know, you get a compass course and you'd convert it from true to magnetic and that's what you would sail. So you need a course of your destination.

You need a way to measure your progress at sea. And that back in the day was a TAF rail log. and then you need a way to verify your position at sea and that was you know using a sextant you know shooting stars or sun lines and advancing the sun you've got a dead reckoning position you check it with your sun lines uh you advance your sun lines for a fix and then you take an afternoon sun line and you advance your morning sun line or your new set noon side line or both And then you get a fix. And then if you're lucky enough to get a good, you know, set of star coordinates in the evening, you get a two or three or four or five star fix. And then, you know exactly where you are. And then you need a way to to and that gives you also the other requirement, which is how to measure the offset by current leeway, steering error and so on.

so no matter what the system is it has to be able to do that so how does the Micronesian navigation how does it accomplish those three objectives and I'll try to shorten this up the first one is Wulfanu

which literally means gaze at the island each from each island so you have Wulfanu Satawan which is the star coasts from Satawal to all the islands around it. So, and it's recited in a long chant.

I sit on Saddlewall. I go rising my lap, which is Altair, Puluat. I sit on Puluat. I go setting my lap, Altair, on Saddlewall, and so on. So you have to commit all that to memory. Sure. For all the islands, that's your chart kit. So you've got Wolfhead here.

Then the really interesting part of it is called Etak. and et doc means stage or segment and because you don't have you know you don't have a plotting sheet you don't have a chart you can't measure you can't chart your progress or visualize your project progress across the ocean you know by charting it on a right on a plotting sheet or a chart so et doc has the island of departure where you start the island the target island which is your end point, and a reference island off to one side through which the star paths radiate, dividing the course into segments or etak. And you visualize your progress along the great path, it's called, the course, the great path, by picturing the canoe is stationary

and the islands moving around you so you're just sitting there so it's like you know now we're used to it because yeah you know google maps does that for your car right uh but so that's and there's no way to verify it you know because you don't have any independent means of of fixing your position right so so what if you you know are lost right what if you can't you know you get confused and you're scrambled or you or you have you know two days of inclement weather 24 hours of inclement weather and you can't see the stars or right swells are confused and then there's a system called buguf which is sea creatures that are arrayed around each island all through the carolina islands you know it could be a whale uh pot of killer whales it could be a dolphin

uh with another fish swimming around its snout it could be a specific bird and these creatures were put in the sea by the spirits of navigation by the two founders of the two schools of navigation foundward and ready on and you question these guys and they look at you're like do you think i'm crazy and then you say you know have you seen this yeah i have and i document a thing in the book where urupa was piala's brother said are these really there and yeah i mean he was trained and you know he went to western high school and then didn't want to be come a westerner so he went back and returned to his navigational studies and he said yeah i've seen him and he counted on his fingers i've seen pugo five times so i said

well there's a there's a turtle that's on the course to truck and uh i said so is the turtle always there he said yeah and i said so if you if you sail to the point where the turtle is will you see it no but if it's always always there then why won't you see it he said well we don't sail for Eppar. We sail for the island. So I went through this whole thing. It's like, okay, what if you are slightly to the south and the wind dies

and you get pushed by a current and the current takes you north and I'm drawing all this in my notebook and you get to the point where the turtle is. Will you see the turtle? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. So how come? So, well, because then you're lost

and the spirits of navigation put these creatures in the sea to help us when we were lost. I said, okay, fine. So if you have a, take a buoy. What's a buoy? A float. And you point and you anchor

it to the bottom in the position of the turtle. And then you go back and find your buoy. Will you see the turtle? And then he got started squirming around. We're sitting on mats in my hut. He squirms and squirms and squirms. He says, yeah, I guess

I guess you'd have to, wouldn't you? I mean, that would be true. And he said, but look, we don't have, you know, big, strong canoes of steel like you guys do. And we don't have sextants and all the navigational equipment that you do. So we have, we have sailing canoes that are made of wood and they're fragile and our navigation doesn't have any sophisticated stuff like you guys do and so if we get lost we have the sea creatures to tell us where we are so that's the point at which the physical right realities of navigation spill into the metaphysical and that's what really that's that's what really got me interested yeah because is the navigator not only a practitioner of practical arts but also the mediator of the metaphysical arts if you will

yeah and um i mean i think for any navigator out there this stuff is fascinating i mean and it doesn't exist anymore these guys are all gone oripa's dead pialik's dead or the league is dead all these guys are dead they're all gone that whole old guard is gone gone gone gone gone but you know yeah so the the systems yeah the systems will uh uh wolf and the sailing directions the the step by step you know if the wind is blowing this direction and you have this current offset which you measure by doing it's basically a hand-bearing compass but they don't have a hand-bearing compass the backside to the island and they have a set of ranges on each island and they can determine the current offset by looking at the ranges.

It's called Faton Amouir. It's backside. Faton Amouir is looking behind. And that's an essential part. So that gives you, you know, if you have any, each voyage has a specific set of sailing directions that depend on what your offset is when you do Faton Amouir, when you backside. so if it's zero current offset then you sail the main course and if it's um you know one star or half a star offset uh or a full star offset you have different courses that you sail

depending on you know the the offset so a lot of it is directly transferable yeah just different methodology and it has to be because the the physical problems getting point from point a to be are the same yeah i don't care who you are right you know so that's kind of a long-winded answer to your question but uh all the stuff in the back of the book the appendices that is that's the guts of navigation and that has never been recorded nice yeah that's there that was it's uh for a non-quarter master navigator like myself it was it was fun digging into and i think the folks who know already know a whole lot more than me are going to find that even more fascinating just on that chunk well do they do they still teach uh i know that the navy started teaching

sextant navigation again because they weren't teaching it for a long time i mean i don't think the ships even had sextants aboard but i think they probably do now i i do i mean to be back back in the day there was even in the pre-gps of course i recall it still having sextants around And then I know there was some point going back to at least teaching CELNAV, having that be a thing, and I couldn't speak right now. I'm sure our listeners will happily chime in and go, oh, yeah, we still do that. We don't know how to do that. So we'll get a lot of comments on the site. So I look forward to that.

This is all very cool. As a timestamp, we're recording this in November of 2025, which I believe is when the reissue of the book should be coming out soon. 25th so it's coming alright that's cool by the time folks this will be out in a few weeks probably so by the time folks listen it'll be out there I'm going to have I'll put a link to the book there on the site here so

folks can order that or go to their local book seller if they want and you said you were doing the audio book on it too yeah yeah cool in fact when we wrap here I'm headed up to I thought it would be easy you know I wrote the book I've read it re-read it a million times

for this new edition And I thought, oh, this will be a piece of cake. It's really hard. It is so hard. Because you almost had all these, which is, you know, a different tongue twister than English. And you want to get it right. And you want to get it, you know, you want to get the narrative drive. You want to do credit to Pialik and Udupa and, you know, these, my masters who gave everything.

and entrusted me with their most treasured knowledge. You know, it's a real honor. Right, right. And it's just a good sort of coming-of-age adventure story, too. There's a lot of ways to go through this book, I think. So I had a really good time reading it, I think. And Christmas is coming for your sailor friends. That's right.

It makes a great gift. You know, I mean, look, I pitched the book for obvious reasons. every author's got a pitch to their book but the other the other reason that I pitch it I mean I've never made you don't make money on books there's no way you just don't but

it's a tribute I think two things number one it's a tribute to their the mastery and genius of this seafaring people I mean it's

it is one of the most beautiful accomplishments of the human mind and and spirit that's number one and number two uh these societies these cultures everywhere across the world are disappearing i mean there's other analogous sure uh there's other analogs yeah you know where you got these magnificent systems that are physical and metaphysical and spiritual all woven into one and they're disappearing and this is sort of like uh you know intellectual um uh extinct extinction it's the equivalent of you know the extinction of species and you know as as part of the richness of being a human being is to be able to understand some of these other magnificent ways of thinking and

seeing the world that are disappearing yeah so it's as much for that as anything else we mentioned when we were starting out that there's now some well-meaning soul put a starlink uplink on sidewall island so now what yeah you know the kids can look at porn on their iphones and do facebook facebook yeah i mean the bulldozer of western civilization is you know is overwhelmingly powerful yeah but it's you there's a lot of good stuff captured in here so hopefully anyway this was just great i really enjoyed the book so thank you way back the day really enjoyed it i think it'd be read on a lot of fronts so so encourage folks to do that um and you meant you're doing the audiobook you mentioned another um working on some stuff with

the University of Hawaii? Some of you are putting your notes together there? Well, so in the 80s, no, like 90s, because I was on this old house. I went to a meeting of the, an anthropological meeting on,

you know, the group of guys, of men and women who study anthropology in Oceania. They said, where are all your notes and all the photographs? And oh, they're in my office at home. And they said, no. No, they're not.

You can't do that because you're the only one who has actual notes from the field. So Ben Finney said, I'm going to introduce you to the archivist, the lead archivist at the University of Hawaii. And so I put everything in archives at the University of Hawaii Manoa. So they're preserved. So all the originals, all 5,000 photographs, all the tapes, all the notes, all the card files, all the systems notebooks and everything else. So a lot of that stuff has never been published. And a lot of it didn't bear directly on the story of The Last Navigator. There were magical chants, chants to call the breadfruit, chants to call the floating logs, and all this stuff.

And so the Sadawalees, with the Sadawalees, we got a grant to pull all this stuff out of the archives, render it in the new orthography. and then Rafapi wanted to check the translation, even though he had done a lot of the initial translation in 1983. And then it's a privately, it will be printed. You'll have to talk to Rafapi if you want to get a copy. Because, no, they're freaked out about AI. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, yeah.

So they don't want it electronic, and so it is a cultural handbook yeah with stuff that's you know if the old guys didn't teach the next generation then it's gone yeah so this this is the teachings of the elders and it's fast you know it's i mean i i it it's rare that you get a chance in your life to come back to revisit a work that you did 40 years ago right that's a huge part of your life i mean to That's all I did for basically a decade. And my wife, who's still my wife, was extremely tolerant. And by the end of it, she said, okay, now it's time for you to go get a job.

That's when I ended up on this old house. So I didn't actually have to get a real job. But it's rare to be able to go back and revisit such a powerful experience that you had when you're in your 30s to do so when you're in your 70s. early 70s and to make it you make sure that it's done and done for posterity right and it's just it's been a great pleasure it's been a great pleasure to you know become reacquainted with the the guys that remain on saddlewall you know that were my brothers i was adopted into their clan so i'm counted as one of their brothers yeah yeah it's cool yeah it's amazing it is cool it's It was an amazing read, and it was cool and amazing to talk to you, Steve.

This was super fun. So anyway, I want to thank you for being on here and thank all the listeners for joining in today on this. This is one of the cooler ones I've ever done. So thanks so much. Well, if you feel like you're missing house stuff, that's the next book I'm working on. Oh, nice. All right.

Well, tell us about that. Well, you know, if I don't write it, so I decided to not hang up my tool belt, But, you know, park it at least for the winter, because I went back into building, as I mentioned early on in this interview. But there's having grown up, having spent a lifetime in houses, I did two things. You know, I was on I was sailing and I was on working on houses. I was working on boats, sailing boats and working on houses. and the whole uh i mean those of us who love ships and love boats and love sailboats

know it's a whole world and it's kind of a uh when you when you understand it from the inside it's like you understand the inner mysteries of ships and the inner mysteries of you know how to get the most out of a sailboat and so how do you do that for for houses what are the inner mysteries of houses so this is you know steve thomas house or you know my life in houses and yeah it's going to be this old house uh renovation nation uh all the cool projects that i did both for this with show and also um you know on my own and yes i will answer the question what's norm really like because people still want to know i mean that whole that experience the whole this whole house experience was you know once in a lifetime thing too yeah that's that's what i'm working on nice

that's that's fantastic and i i appreciate for all the things you've done that uh being on our simsec podcast was apparently the the last the pinnacle of all your media appearances so really appreciate it this is great i mean if this was great it's rare that you get to talk to a really knowledgeable you know a specialized nautical audience it's yeah this this group is that's one thing they have in common i think is like you they're they're kind of like they like things on the water so this was great and yeah something we we don't get to do much is have someone like you on here so really appreciate it well thanks for inviting me and thanks for claude for introducing us exactly as always i'm gonna get i'm gonna give him a call right now

All right. Thanks again, Claude. Thanks again, listeners. Aloha to everyone. See you next time. Bye-bye. Thank you. Oh, no.