Steve Thomas is familiar to television viewers as the two-time Emmy award-winning host of This Old House, Renovation Nation, and Save Our History. But he is also an experienced blue water sailor. Beginning in 1977, he sailed a 43-foot wooden sloop from England to San Francisco via the Panama Canal, Galapagos, Marquesas, and Hawaii. In the early 1980’s, he journeyed to the remote Micronesian island of Satawal to learn the ancient technique of star path navigation, an experience that resulted in this book as well as a documentary for the PBS series Adventure.
This lecture, richly illustrated with Steve’s photographs, will take us into a world of ocean navigation largely unknown to the West, a world in which the traditional navigator’s only directional tools are the stars, the ocean swells and the flight paths of birds. In 1983 and 1984 Steve Thomas spent eleven months on Satawal Island and in the Western Carolines as an apprentice to Mau Piailug, then one of the last paliuw, captains fully initiated in the Talk of Navigation, the closely guarded, ancient practices around reading the cosmos and the seas. He chronicled his experiences and the navigational techniques in the book “The Last Navigator”, first published in 1987, and a documentary film of the same title for PBS in 1988. Now some forty years on he has updated the stories with a new generation of Satawalese islanders and researchers in the revised and fully illustrated edition of “The Last Navigator”.
