Find Aitutaki

Aloha sixth graders!  I hope your final papers all turned out well, and that you're treating Mr. Perkins nicely! I hope you are making me proud and finishing the year off with good work and good behavior.  I wanted to share with you my own version of the Challenger mission.  This one was called "find Aitutaki".  Have Mr. Perkins show you where that is.  Basically, we were sailing from Borabora to Aitutaki.  My good friend Wati Forbes and I were doing the navigation as a team.  This was the first time I'd really done navigation in about 10 years, and the first time without one of MY teachers around to give me direction and answer questions.  The last few weeks before I left, you all probably didn't know it, but I was doing my own research into the stars and planets that would be visible to us throughout our journeys.  The difference between the Challenger mission and our sail, however, is that we had no time limit.  Yes, we had a schedule to try and keep, but the "mission" didn't end until the island was found. It was quite a challenge to stay up the first night, but it was important to get a sense of what stars were up at what times.  After that, it became surprisingly easier to stay up, and the last night, I was up for about 20 hours without sleep.  Wati and I have trained in slightly different ways, mine being a little more mathematical, his being a little more traditional, but we found that our styles complemented (vocab word!) each other nicely. We also had our share of "emergencies", such as thunder storms, nights where you could only see one star at a time and times of total cloud cover.  Between the two of us, we could usually figure out our course and stay on track.  The difference between our emergencies and yours is that we had no task cards to follow.  Solving the emergencies was entirely based on our prior knowledge and combined information.  One "emergency" arose when some of my research did not match the latitude measurement of the stars we were looking at.  I was convinced that we should stay on the course that we had plotted, but Wati was convinced that we had actually gone too far north, and that we should turn back to south.  Although I didn't like the idea, I trust Wati and we followed his course.  The hard part for me is that if we followed his course, it meant that I was wrong, and as you all know, being wrong is hard to swallow.  However, it is an important part of learning, because you have to figure out, as we did, what is right.  I have to thank our captain, Greg, for not bowing to time pressure and telling us where to go to get us in on time.  Instead, he let us work out the problem and figure out what the error was.  Wati was right, and the next day we saw Aitutaki.  It was very important to me to to make the mistake, because I learned.  Although I do know quite a bit about navigation, there is so much I don't know, and we should all realize that - no one knows everything.  Learning continues throughout your WHOLE life!  I am happy to have gotten this experience under my belt, and I am ready for the navigation to Rarotonga (we'll be teaching some of our other crew as it is a short sail) as well as Samoa beyond.  Although being wrong upset me at first, I realized the next day that the extra time we spent at sea correcting our course was extra time that I got to learn from Wati; it was something that I really needed and in the end I am grateful for the mistake I made.  I know that sounds odd to some of you, but I hope you will keep it in mind when YOU make mistakes...there are often good surprises hidden in them.  Keep working hard!

Ms. Fuller

P.S.  I wore my 6F shirt the other night - I love it!