Celestial navigation

Imagine sailing across the Pacific Ocean using no GPS, no phones, and no modern technology, just the natural environment.

Siblings Te Poor and Te Kahawaiikirangi used their celestial navigation skills to get the 60-man crew of double-hulled waka Te Matau a Māui safely to Samoa.

A six-week ocean voyage retracing the ancestral pathway of the waka Tākitimu.

Meane a te pūrongo, ā Aroha Treacher.

Did I read the tohu properly? Are we going in the right direction?

You have a real appreciation for what our tīpuna went through all those years ago.

[waves crashing] A mission to revive celestial navigation.

[Instrumental music] Using just these hand signals, siblings Te Kaha and Te Poor are about to set off on a uniquely epic journey.

I mean, we set off on the Pacific from Yacht Club Perrano, which is where the Contiki expedition set off.

And they were very much doing that, using sextants, and it was all celestial navigation.

And, you know, obviously that was an expedition that was...

Thor Heyerdahl had conceived of because of this huge tradition of these incredible ancient mariners from Peru and South America.

A lot of that knowledge, I think it was generational and I think sadly lost, but just the amazing ability to pinpoint islands on the Pacific from such a huge distance, it's really quite astonishing.

I think we definitely regretted not having kind of even just a fundamental knowledge of kind of celestial navigation in so much that we could kind of appreciate it, we probably would have still used the charts and that sort of thing.

But I think it'd be a really interesting exercise.

I mean, you're in a you're in quite a funky headspace.

Now the harbor.

This is the seafaring district and is unlocked when you discover Celestial Navigation.

Buildings in this district include Lighthouse, Shipyard, and Seaport.

And if you don't have a commercial hub in the city, adding a harbor can give you one additional trade route.

Approximately 1,890 miles, open ocean the entire way, with no islands, no emergency fields, no rescue, no radio navigation, no reliable weather forecasting.

Just compass headings, celestial navigation, and whatever fuel the airframe could carry.

Several teams crashed before they ever reached the Atlantic, others suffered mechanical failures during preparation and had to scratch, and one team had already tried and nearly died trying.

Harry Hawker and Kenneth McKenzie Grieve went in May, about a month before Alcock and Brown.

He was not primarily a pilot, he was a navigator.

He had flown during the war, been shot down over Germany, and spent time in a German prisoner of war camp as well.

But his real gift was mathematics and celestial navigation, the ability to take a star sight from a moving platform and translate it into a position on the ocean.

In 1919, when aerial navigation over open water was still being invented as people went, that skill was worth more than almost anything else.