Dear Sir,

Thank you all for the replies to my letter. Two recurring themes kept appearing; Micronesians and Polynesians are apparently now the same as Maoris (that goes against DNA findings!) as all of the stories refer to them, and secondly, a bit of huff and puff and anecdotes and even an attempted personal insult from Mr Butler, but no explanation of how this navigation works. I can not respond to every point made but will try to cover as much as possible. I do not doubt that both crews of the Waka Tapus have worked hard, but please do not insult the intelligence of the public by claiming they are replicating anything traditional. They have comfort, modern navigation equipment (allegedly not used), lighting, batteries, satellite communications, radio communication with the other boat, and even hot meals (traditional beef?) and it's extremely unlikely that if they don't make landfall when expected, and food supplies have ended, that the weakest paddler will be tomorrows meal. Apparently the two waka captains have been schooled by a Micronesian master, with the un-maori sounding name of Mau Pialug. Why were they not schooled by a Maori navigator as this is supposed to replicate traditional maori navigation, not micronesian/polynesian navigation?! One correspondent quoted me as using the term "stone age" in my letter but I did not, so why make that up? As expected, it seems I been labelled a racist because I am daring to doubt the authenticity of this voyage?

Pre European maori had no alphabet or written language, no way of measuring time, angles or distances and probably no numerical system. I doubt they understood the earth was not flat and many historians claim they found NZ by good luck, not good navigation. Maori now have all this but it has been copied from the Europeans - it is not traditional. By stumbling upon land after months at sea and not knowing the land was there in the first place, how can this be a great feat of navigation? I have no doubt anybody with a basic sense could find their way to the west coast of the Americas (it's a huge coastline between southern Chile and northern Alaska) but to find a small Island in a vast ocean requires precision in ones navigation. Never have I heard or seen anything that proves Maori had charts or knew anything about the earth. I wonder why these mighty Wakas never paddled a mere thousand miles to the west (against the prevailing conditions but certainly not impossible) and claimed Australia where meat and food, including another race, was there for the taking??

Having just had a glance at the 'Navigators Update' on their website I read "We'll definitely site land by morning...". This is not the kind of confidence I expect from someone using no instruments, no charts, no modern navigation systems, no compass, no log, no chronometer etc. And to the correspondent who claimed I should be aware of "Dead Reckoning", well, over many days using DR, one can be hundreds of miles out especially without use of the above mentioned.

I stand by 100% what I said before as I believe these two Wakas are cheating big time and really not achieving anything meaningful apart from giving the crew an adventure, and I am happy to agree to disagree with the differing views of my detractors.

D. Gordon
Mount Maunganui