From the Vault: Pacific Navigation, Part 2

part two. In the last episode, we talked about the settlement, the original colonization of the Pacific Islands, and today we're back to talk about some documentation of the amazing navigation techniques used by the master navigators of various Pacific islands.

And I'm really excited to talk about this stuff today because I've been reading this big, very important book on the subject that was published in nineteen seventy two by an author named David Lewis, called We the Navigators that involves extensive interviews with and then direct sailing and firsthand observation of the navigation techniques of master navigators from the Pacific Islands. For example, a man named Tevak of the Santa Cruz Reef Islands and a man named hip Or

of Poula Watt in the Carolines. And today we're gonna be talking about some of these specific navigation techniques. Yeah, and again these are the techniques of environmental navigation, so navigation at sea on the open sea, conducted without instruments. And so I mean that's ultimately the really amazing part

of this. But then at the same same time, I want to stress something we've mentioned in the first episode that this is also not based in sort of a gut instinct, a kind of well I've been at sea enough, I kind of know what I'm doing. No, this is a this is a science. This is this is these are techniques that would have that were passed down from generation to generation, from skilled individual to two skilled individual.

And uh and so you know, we see this continued on in oral traditions, but then also we've seen them recorded, especially in the last few decades. Uh, that there's been a resurgence of interest in this um an effort to to make sure that these traditions and techniques survived and then also to use them to understand the history of

the colonization of these islands by ancient humans, right. And one of the points that Lewis argues in his book is that the colonization of the islands of the Pacific was not driven entirely by random drift, say, people getting blown off course by a storm or getting lost and then happening upon a new island. That that Instead, he argues that a lot of these islands were probably discovered by deliberate exploratory probes. Right, So let's get into some

of the techniques. Then We're going to start with what may seem the most obvious, and that is the stars. There are a lot of amazing techniques to talk about, but this is by far the most important one. Yes, So Pacific islanders, uh, specifically, the trained navigators, they did use the stars. The train navigator knew the positions of

important stars and their relationship to islands by heart. They knew how the pattern of the stars changed depending on where you went and what time of the year it was. And they could also use the stars to determine latitude, so that's her north south positioning. They could roughly determine where they were in relation to the equator based on the height of polaris or the southern cross above the horizon, which they would measure, again not using instruments, but using

the human hand. Yes, or sometimes I think also maybe uh, parts of the boat could be used to sort of orient with the stars on the horizon. So if you're unfamiliar with this kind of technique, as obviously most of us are as I am, the mind is immediately boggled. Right you think, Okay, how would I use the stars to find I don't know, a city or something like that. Uh, you don't. You wouldn't even know where to start. But once you know what to look for, this actually becomes

an extremely reliable method. Uh, And specifically the really important guide stars here are constellations that are low in the sky around the point where they are either rising or setting, and can be easily associated with a particular heading toward the horizon. So you're steering your boat and you're observing the stars right around the horizon. So these would be either stars and star constellations that have recently risen or are about to set, depending on which direction east west

you're heading. So if you have a particular destination in mind, and you know you're starting position, you can associate your destination with a particular guide star, or what a guide star would actually mean is a series of stars and star constellations that will move move vertically up and down across the sky as the night goes on. But they might be identified by say the first star you would see in the sequence, as as the guide star, and then the train of subsequent stars that would move up

and down as the night goes on. But that is associated with a particular island. Now, of course, it gets much more complicated than that, because, for one thing, you have to take into account position and geography. Because while a star can help give you a heading toward a known island that's associated with it would only necessarily be

associated with the island you're heading for from a particular direction. Right, So if you're heading from east to west, the island you're looking for is under a certain star, but if you're heading from north to the same island, that island

would be under a different star. Right. So the stars help you get an orientation, but you have to know the relationships between a sort of mental map of islands in your head and how shifting the starting point of the journey will shift, what star path will lead you to your island destination. But it gets even more complicated than that, because, of course, as we mentioned, the stars don't stay still throughout the night. The earth is rotating, so the fixed stars rise and set across the sky

over the course of a night. And as the stars rise higher or set below the horizon, they become less useful or not useful at all for navigating without equipment and charts, not just because say, they're higher as they're rising up, but also because they tend to rise at an angle, so they won't stay right where they're supposed to be on the horizon. What you want is a reference star that is either just rising if you're heading east, or is just about to set if your head west. Um,

So what do you do there? Well, what you would tend to do is cycle through new sets of rising or falling guide stars that you know will keep you pointed in the right direction. And Lewis writes about this that on average you won't need more than about ten guide stars to sail through an entire night, given the amount of time that each star is usually pretty close to the horizon, close enough to be usable. So you can almost imagine kind of a I don't know, like

those like stock ticker strips. You know, the old one is like a strip of stars that are peeling up over the horizon all night long, and each one, you know, is the next one in the set that is still oriented with the top star in that strip that will keep you going in the direction you need to go.

But stop and think about, like how much memorization this requires, Like how much you need to know about what the stars look like, what their orientations are, and their relationships to the islands you need to get to depending on where you're starting point is So the amount of now vigational lore that needs to be committed to memory and the amount of detail in it is is absolutely astounding.

I mean, it reminds me a little. These are not directly comparable at all, but it reminds me a little of how in or was it Mark Twain's life on the Mississippi talking about how an experienced riverboat pilot would need to know by heart the entire river, like all the various details of its its twist and binds, its depth, etcetera, and everything that went into knowing it. Which, um, yeah, from what I've read, you can you can basically take that and apply it to to any kind of nautical setting.

And certainly this one is well like you would need to to know by heart the environment through which you would be uh sailing, the environment of the waters, but also the environment of the stars above. Yeah. And it seems that while I don't know, while the mental memorization of physical surroundings on land, including like trees and changes in terrain and rocks and landmarks and stuff like that, it maybe this is just my land lubber bias, but it it seems like that kind of thing probably comes

more intuitively. It's more just sort of like a biological default to recognize landmarks like plants and rocks and stuff like that. Then it would be to memorize the stars as your landmarks for guidance. Yeah, yeah, I think you're right.

I mean, it almost feels like saving through through space. Uh, though of course there's gonna be plenty concerning the water itself and uh and uh and other environmental cues that will get to But but certainly at this point in the in the podcast, it's easy to to almost think of these as space voyages because of the degree of focus that must be placed on the stars, right, and so experienced specific navigators can use these rising and setting

guide stars to form this extremely accurate mental compass. Lewis gives one example of one of his voyages with the navigator TVAK, and he says, quote, by these obliquely sinking stars, he was able to inform me that during the evening that the wind had backed from southeast to south southeast.

I seriously doubted the accuracy of his observation until Canopus, topping the horizon on a bearing of a hundred and forty three degrees exactly in line with our stern, confirmed that we were in fact dead on course and that the wind had changed. Now, there's another variation on the idea of guide stars for navigation that is known as the sidereal compass. That is basically like a view of the night sky that identifies particular rising or setting stars

with points on an imagined compass. Again, this is not a piece of equipment and external tool. This is a compass in the brain that has a picture a mental map of the stars and how the stars along the horizon will give you information about north, southeast, and west. Now, these are the basic primary methods of navigation by stars, but obviously in practice, it's a lot more complicated, so

a few examples. Of course, there is a lot of adjusting the course to compensate for variations in currents and winds, and to be adaptable for for celestial orientation markers when part of the sky is obscured, for example, by clouds, and I'll mention more about that in a minute. There's another thing that's a complication with the use of guide

stars for navigation, which is the seasonality of guide stars. Now, of course, the availability of guide stars varies with the seasons, because the sidereal day is actually twenty three hours and fifty six minutes long, not twenty four hours. So each star rises and sets four minutes earlier each night. And as you can imagine, as this builds up over time, you're actually going to be having different star maps available

to you as the year goes on. So in illustrating this, Lewis writes that quote Tevak told me that the sailing season in the Santa Cruz group lasted all year round, and that there were appropriate steering stars for each time of year. Similarly, when two two indicated the stars for the Nomuka Tonga Tapoo passage, he stressed that the ones he was showing me were usable only up to about September, after which new stars and sailing directions had to be used.

So not only do you have to understand this whole star map and its relationship to the island geography, but also if you if you're sailing across different seasons, you have to have the seasonal backups in mind as well.

Then there's even more to to take into account. One thing, for example, is wind and leeway, So experience navigators will have a mental map to reach their destination that must include compensation for leeway, you know, the sideward drift of a boat as as is blown sort of off course

by wind. So if the navigator knows that the destination is under a particular star, but there is a known and relatively dependable amount of southerly drift on the journey do to prevailing winds and currents, they actually have to aim a certain amount north of the guide star. Yeah, and that's just for permanent drifts. There's also sort of more ad hoc compensation that has to take place along

the way as well. But one of the big things that that really struck me about this was how how much it inverts the logic of nighttime navigation versus daytime navigation. You know, uh, like, how how would you think, what do you think would be the best time to try to get somewhere. Obviously you would probably think it's in the day right when you can see where you need

to go. But it is much easier to use the highly dependable celestial navigation techniques of of the Pacific Islander navigation lore at night than it is in the daytime. There there's still tools they use in the daytime, and I'll talk about those in a minute. Um, But even when the stars are largely obscured by clouds and experience, navigator can usually use some stars in the sky to orient and to get onto the correct bearing, for example, by noting which stars might lie it's a nine d

degrees to the course, etcetera. Yeah, I mean it almost sounds like you would you would probably want to leave the shore, you know, around dusk, um, and uh, and then once and then hopefully you're you're out to sea by the time the stars have come out. Right. Well, there's actually there's a good bit of thought about when are the best times to arrive and depart. So they talked about Yeah, I think it's usually customary to leave

during the daytime. And one of the main reasons it's important to leave during the daytime is not only that people can be notified and you can say prepare things to take along with you that same day, like fresh food, and you can say your farewells to people during the daytime, but you can also look back at the island you're leaving from to get back bearings, right, so you can make use of the land if your navigation for as

long as it's feasible, right. And it's also usually can cosidered important to arrive at your destination during the daytime because one of the great perils actually of Pacific navigation is accidentally missing your target in the dark. If you sail past the island in the dark and you don't realize you've done it, that can be uh that that could be a death sentence. So it's kind of interesting while you're out on the open ocean, navigating at night

is ideal. That's you know, where you get these accurate guide stars. But I think it's often considered good to leave the island during the daytime and to arrive at your destination during the daytime. And sometimes uh. And there might be some exceptions to that, but those seem to be some general principles that were observed at least that

Lewis mentioned and uh. And so that would require very careful timing of the journey, right, Like you need to know pretty much exactly how long it's going to take, how many days, so that you can time it out like that. And just as one example about the dangers of missing an island at night, uh, the Lewis talk about at least one of the navigators he worked with having a practice of when you're getting close to the island and it's really dark out, sometimes they would just

stop sailing. They would slow down. They would uh it's called heaving to you know, they would heave to to slow the progress of the boat, just to be super careful that they didn't accidentally, say, sail between two islands unnoticed in the middle of the night. But while the nighttime star navigation is the most accurate thing to use, there are clues you can use for navigation in the daytime as well. For example, you can use the sun. It's more difficult to use the sun, but it can

be done. Uh. And it's more difficult for a number of reasons. First of all, there's only one of it, and its position can vary a lot over the seasons. Right, Unlike the stars, the relative position of the Sun on the horizon of Earth has a lot more variability. But even with the seasonal variability of the Sun's position, you can still use it to navigate by pairing it with external reference to the stars. And this was one of

the many moments in this book. It gave me that like, oh, of course kind of feeling, and this was one of them. So uh So, Lewis writes at one point about another scholar who had been writing about Pacific navigation uh named

acre Blom. He says, quote acre Blom surprisingly asserts that to achieve a satisfactory degree of accuracy when checking the course by means of the bearing of the rising or setting sun, the Polynesian navigator must necessarily have had access to some form of memorized table of the changes in the sun's asimuth. So it's you know, changes in rising and setting patterns over the seasons. But contrary to that, Lewis says, all the navigator actually needs, of course, are

his eyes and a knowledge of the stars. The sun star comparison could be made twice in each day if one were so minded. So when the sun is rising or setting, you can check its orientation with respect to the stars that appear, you know, before or after it, and then you can basically know where on the horizon it is rising or setting at this time of er. Wow. Yeah. Now there are other methods of maintaining course setting during the daytime that are again more difficult than the nighttime,

but still possible. And another method that I thought was really interesting was steering by ocean swells. And there are actually two different uses here. Um, So there's one thing, which is navigation by swells in the open water. So if you're out you know no side of land anywhere nearby, you can use ocean swells to help you do direction finding, just like you would use the sun or the stars. But in addition to that, using the swells is actually

a land finding technique. It changes in how the ocean swells are affected by nearby land masses can be used to locate islands that are nearby, and this is something we'll probably talk about more in the next part of this of this series. But what does it mean to

steer by swells in the daytime. Well swells are permanent wave patterns with specific cardinal origin points, which are associated not with waves kicked up by transient weather, but with strong and persistent wind patterns associated with specific permanent weather systems, for example, the trade winds or what or what A Louis calls the Southern Ocean belt of strong Westerly's. Yeah, and I think we can sort of loosely imagine like a recreation of a basic form of this, you know,

some sort of a model or a simulation. If you had a body of water and you had say a fan or something creating some sort of you know, disturbance across the surface, and it it was regular, what would

happen if you then dropped some islands in there? It could disrupt the waves, especially in if we were talking in in the actual ocean, in the form of long ocean waves as they bend around land masses, and and this wave disruption can be identified by a skilled eye enable them to detect land hundreds of kilometers wave and which is is pretty amazing, right, And so that's the kind that would be used specifically for the land finding, right, But you can also use the c swells, like you

would use the stars to get directional orientation to know which direction is north southeast or west without a compass, because if you know basically what direction a c swell that is permanent and reliable comes from, you can detect that swell and then no, okay, that way is south southeast. Right. So so now we have not only the stars above, but also uh the wave patterns the CEA swells as well. Right, So these permanent weather patterns, they originate in a fairly

consistent direction from your location. Now, part of the ignorant land dweller in me is just incredulous here, right, Like when I'm out in a boat on the ocean, waves seem utterly random to me. I could not I could not identify that waves are coming from a particular direction. And you know, but they're well, unless it's coming from a ski do right then you write motor boat that's coming. By then it's pretty clear what's creating the distraction. That's

a good point. But you know, just the general choppy wave patterns of the ocean, I wouldn't have any idea what to do. But if you are trained in knowing what to look for, you actually can identify particular wave patterns or swell patterns. Lewis actually makes a distinction between waves and swells um but but they're not just random. The system of orientation based on swells is not as reliable as the stars, but it's still pretty reliable. So the question would be, well, how do you detect them?

One interesting fact is that the navigators Lewis learned from seemed to consult the swells based on feeling them in the body more so than looking at them, which means that they can be used to steer not only in the daytime, but on overcast nights. So when the stars are completely hidden that's your main orientation tool gone, and there's no light to see, you could still potentially feel the directional swells and get an orientation based on that. Wow,

that's interesting and it makes perfect sense. So how do you feel swells? Well, there's a part in Lewis's book where he talks about this. He says, quote T. K told me he would sometimes retire to the hut on his canoes out rigger platform, where he could lie down and without distraction, more readily direct the helmsman onto the proper course. By analyzing the role and pitch of the

vessel as it cork screwed over the waves. In distinguishing swells, he stressed, you have to wait patiently until the one you want has a spell of being prominent and discernible. So there is a lot of noise in the waves, right, So there's a lot of conflicting, you know, wave wave

action coming in different directions. But there's a certain pattern you can recognize from a known swell, And once there's a there's the right kind of timing in the wave action for you to IDENTI find the pattern of that known directional swell, you can orient based on that, and this would be again done by feeling it in the body and feeling the direction of the rolling of the boat.

So when you think about how a boat moves in the waves, it can pitch, it can move up and down, forward to back, and it can roll from side to side, and the interaction of pitch and roll will tell you something about the direction that the swell is coming from.

Right now, in saying that this type of navigation method is more reliable than it sounds, I also don't want to overstate or understate the difficulty of detecting it right that there is a lot of noisy way of action going on in the ocean, so somebody has to be really experienced and know what it is they're feeling for in order to feel it. And I just want to read one section of Lewis talking about attempting to understand

what's going on with the navigation based on swells. Uh He writes, quote the course toward Tomaco was east northeat directly into the C swell that came from the same direction that it was only present or at any rate detectable. Occasionally at such times it could be picked out by I, and as the ship rowed up and over it, meaning pitched without any role at all, except when the steep northerly wind wave happened to coincide when the boat, the Spiorn was rolled to starboard at the same moment as

she was pitching over the head on C swell. In those long intervals where the C swell was absent, the wind wave rolled us to starboard about once every five seconds without there being any pitching component. I could feel little effect from the southeast or northwest swells. After nightfall, we steered by the stars, the swells remaining unchanged except that the wind wave declined. So that's about like trying

to understand that they're different. In fact, there are multiple swells at any given time, probably hitting you from different directions, and so the experience navigator is looking or a particular type of swell. You know that you could actually make the same journey potentially and look for different swells to steer you in aid of it. You just have to

know which ones you're feeling for. And that goes back to the example you mentioned earlier about just like like setting there or laying there on the boat and just waiting to to feel the one you're looking for. It's not just okay, the waves you're hitting me, I got the pattern. No, you're looking for the specific pattern amid the noise or amid the waves right when there may be multiple patterns coming at you at the same time. You're just trying to pick the right one out, get

the timing right to understand, yes, this is it. But as you were talking about earlier, I think it's important to remember and again, well we'll get more into this in the next episode. The ability to detect and measure swells in their direction of origin is not useful just in steering on the open ocean, but it's also one of the techniques for understanding when land is near. Now, there are a couple of other things that are really

interesting about navig aiding on the open ocean. There's one more orientation technique that is even less reliable than the others, but it is sometimes still used as a backup. That's known as the wind compass. So it's it's basically operating on the presence of known wind patterns to give you

indications about about directionality. So you might, for example, use the aid of a tool here, an external tool like a pennant, the you know, kind of flag object that would allow you to determine patterns of winds and where they come from. And if you know that there are certain dominant patterns of winds, you can kind of use that to give you another data point in orienting your boat in the right direction. Now, there's a whole other world of ad hoc adjustment that needs to take place

on top of everything we've already been talking about. You know, basically everything we've been talking about is getting the correct bearing, knowing you're going in the right direction towards your target island based on your starting point. But of course in sailing you can always just sail in a straight line. Right winds and ocean currents will gradually shift you off course and you have to understand how that's happening and

compensate for it. Which again this is one of those things where I just like react to that, thinking like it seems impossible, how could you do it? But but they have methods that they can do it. And there are a lot of methods here, but for example, one that I really liked, Lewis discusses on the first stage of one journey with hip Hoor, departing from pula Wat, hip Hoor would keep track of back bearings on the island that they were leaving to see how the current

was affecting their heading. So you have the reference point of the island, landmarks the island you're leaving, and then you can see from your heading as you're leaving the

island how strong the current is at the moment. And then, to to read from Louis here quote if said hip Hoor it turned out on further observation to be weak, we would head towards It's the point where vegas set, which is about at three hundred and nine degrees if strong, as proved to be the case towards the setting point of the pl A D s at about two hundred

and eighty five degrees. Thus there were at least two distinct star courses traditionally laid down for this passage, and probably four to allow for strong and weak south flowing currents.

This was a north flowing current. So not only do you need to know the right headings for uh, for the island you need to get to under you know, basically like neutral conditions, you also have to know what headings you would use if the current is a certain strength in a certain direction and the corresponding guide stars of course, um. But so if the wind or current is moving you laterally off course while steering in the open ocean, and so you don't have like, you know,

back bearings like an island to refer to. How would you even know it? How do you know how far off course you're getting blown by the wind. This was another moment where the technique was revealed and was like, oh, of course, I thought this method was ingenious. Some of the navigators here would look at the wake left behind by the boat. So if if leeway I mean, you know, wind the blowing the boat sideways in addition to forward.

If leeway is affecting your course, one way to judge this is by looking at the degree of the angle between the straight line you're attempting to steer on. So you can imagine a straight line going from the stern to the bow of the boat, you know, and just going off towards the horizon in every direction. Look at the angle between that line and the trail of wake left behind you. This might be kind of hard to visualize without a without a picture, so I'm sorry, but Rob,

I've got a picture for you to look at. Here you can see that there's actually an angle of difference in between the wake behind the boat as you're getting blown off course and the straight line that you are

attempting to steer on. Yeah, you can imagine it is looking back and saying, not a straight wake behind you going back to you know, to just directly behind you, as if it is a line drawn from the rear of the vessel, but something that is diagonal because because of the way the wind is blowing the vessel from the side right. So by seeing that angle and how large it is, a master navigator is able to correct for the amount of leeway that they're being blown off course.

Now there's a huge thing that we haven't gotten into in detail yet here, but a big section of Lewis's book is about the Pacific navigation forms of dead reckoning, and dead reckoning is estimating the position of your boat without reference to any new markers around you, but rather by knowing your past position and estimating how far you have traveled from there and in what direction. So this

is crucial to keeping track of your journey. But this is a different thing because it's not giving you new information from your surroundings. It's rather a sort of keeping track of your position on a mental map by just using the information already in your possession. And one mental tool that seems to help with this process and Pacific

navigation has been referred to as attack. Again, this is not a means of acquiring new information from the environment, but rather a visualization or a mental reference system for understanding one's place in relation to other things. Unfortunately, this is yet another concept that is kind of hard to explain without visual aids. But Rob, I've got a visual aid for you to look at here, and I will

do my best to try to explain it. Basically, it hinges on having this mastery of relationships between stars, vantage points, and various geographical locations, specifically islands on in the nearby surroundings. So as a point of analogy, imagine that you want to travel between New York in Chicago by stars. One way that I can help understand where I am along my journey is if I have a third reference point

in mind. So let's say Atlanta. So I know that I start in New York, and when I start in New York, I know from where I am, Atlanta is going to be under Star A from my point of view. So if I wanted to travel to Atlanta, I would take my beer, I would head towards Star A on

the horizon. But by the time I reached Chicago, now, because I'm at a different vantage point, Atlanta is underneath Star C from my point of view, and there's a midpoint in between Chicago and New York where Atlanta, from my vantage point is underneath Star B. So the whole time I never see Atlanta. But this mental reference system allows me to break my journey into recognizable segments where I keep track of each time the third reference island or in my analogy, Atlanta has moved under a new

star from my point of view. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think so. And this this visual reference helps a bed. Yeah, I'm sorry you folks at home can't see it, but uh, actually you know if you do, if you do just a Google search for etach reference points, I don't think you will find the exact um illustration that I'm looking at, but you'll see some that are similar to They give

you an idea of what we're talking about. It's e T A K. Yeah, though it's complicated by the fact that this appears also to be the name of a like a car navigation system, uh software. So if you if you Google attack islands there you'll see the right illustrations. Yeah, yeah, that'll cut out some of the car stuff. But I think this system is is also really interesting because it I think it still is important to think of it as a useful tool for navigation, even though it provides

no additional information to the navigator. Instead, what it is is it seems to be that it's useful as a system for mentally keeping track of the information you already have, for knowing how far you've come, where you are, and how far you have left to go. Uh, which is interesting because I mean, obviously that's an important part of of any travel, right, is sort of visualizing the whole of your journey in ways they're not immediately apparent to

your senses. Yeah, and I guess as in modern travelers with modern instruments, being at sea or on land, Yeah, we're still engaging in some level of that. We still have some level of a mental map, but we have these other tools that make our mental map less important. Maybe sometimes the mental map is even incorrect. Like you know, if you're if you're relying heavily on a GPS device

to drive you from one point to the other. I guess you could theoretically not know if you're really driving north or west or south or what have you, as long as the system got you there. But in this case, the mental map is everything. The Milton in the mental map has to be carefully cultivated using uh knowledge of all of these environmental cues, these different systems. Uh. It's it's really quite quite amazing. Uh it's uh yeah, it's

it's it's something else. So when you're driving somewhere new that you've never been before with the aid of a GPS, you know, like a map, SAP on a phone or something. Can Can you just plug it in and go? Or do you, like me strongly prefer to look at the whole route first. Um, I tend to just go the same way I do recipes for meals. It's just I just trust that. I mean, I look and make sure I have what I need. In the same case, I'll look at my gas tank and make sure I have

enough gas to get where I'm going. I'll see how much how long it says it's gonna take for me to get there. But then I'll just go I'll just start cooking, or I'll or I'll just start driving and trust that I will get there and I'll figure out on the way of there any snakes. This must be differences in personality type somehow, I guess I'm I'm more annoying about this or something. I really don't like having to navigate based on just a moment to moment directions

on an app without seeing the entire route first. I like to look at the whole map, see what the steps are, see how far it is, see like see it visually represented. That really matters to me for some reason. I mean, I might glance at it if if I know there's going to be some weird exit, if it says that, oh, I'm getting off at this exit, and normally I don't do that. I'm kind of curious what route I'm taking then, But otherwise I just go, well,

you know. The weird thing is, I think one reason I do that, it's not like it usually gives me important information that I actually need in addition to whatever the step by step instructions in real time are. Instead, I feel like it's something closer to the attack system, where I just want to be able to visualize in this app stract way the whole of the journey and sort of imagine where I am along the journey at

various points. M yeah, but I feel like I'm going to do that anyway as I drive, Like there's kind of a perhaps a less accurate version of that that's going to be going on in my head. But it says it's as accurate as it needs to be. Yeah, Like if the GPS satellites were to suddenly get taken out by aliens or something, um, you know, I could I get backtrack or even if it's if I've driven this particular route before, I can probably remember the rest

of the way. Um, But otherwise I'm good. Well, I wonder if we should call part two there and then come back in part three to talk about one of the next really interesting things, which is all of this has been mostly about navigation, direction finding and navigation, especially on the open sea, but a whole other part of this science of navigation is land finding. When you're getting close to an island, how do you know that and how do you find it? And so let's save that

for part three. Yeah, part three, we will we will make landfall or try to make landfall appropriately. All right. In the meantime, if you would like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you know where you can find them in the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed. We have core episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Monday's we do a little listener mail. On Wednesdays we do short form episode we're calling it the Artifact, and then

on Friday's we do Weird How Cinema. That's our time to set aside most of the science and the culture and just talk about a weird emotion picture and then we have reruns on the weekend. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would look to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact. That's Stuff to Blow your Mind

dot com Stuff to Blow your Mind. It's production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart Radio. This is the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.