Lost seamanship skills

Pacific Islanders have lost the seaman ship skills of their ancestors, Michael Blanc, an official with the South Pacific Commission’s fisheries programme, has declared.

Announcing that he had devised an education programme earlier this year stressing basic safety rules such as equip ping boats with paddles, sails and spare fuel in case of engine failure, and mirrors to flash distress signals, Blanc said an aver age of 360 small boats were reported miss ing every year in the Pacific Islands. Of these, 60 are never seen.

Blanc said many years ago the ances tors of the islanders could travel thousands of kilometres with the knowledge of stars and today this skill was dead.

Hundreds of years before the Europeans came to the Pacific, Melanesian and Polynesian seamen many many epic voyages across the ocean, using only stars and ocean-wave navigational techniques.

Today, about 95 per cent of Pacific Islanders, who fish at sea, do so in small dinghies powered by unreliable, poorly maintained outboard engines.

Blanc estimated that air searches for missing fishermen was costing a total of SUSS million annually.

The traditonal art of navigating is lost to Pacific Islanders, according to Blanc.