YACHTSMAN & NAVIGATOR

As L. Ron Hubbard once succinctly remarked, ‘What is life without challenge?’ And he met this challenge quite ably aboard the ketch, Magician during his 1940 Alaskan Radio Experimental Expedition.

Flying Explorers Club flag number 105, Mr. Hubbard set off from Seattle, Washington on 27 July 1940. The stated purpose of the expedition: to chart previously unrecorded hazards and coastline for the US Navy Hydrographic Office.

Mr. Hubbard’s expedition saw not only his recharting of a treacherous inside passage to Alaska, but the testing of a then novel Radio Directional Finder. Described as the first real navigational improvement since the sextant, this Radio Direction Finder stands as the linear antecedent to the LORAN (LOng RAnge Navigation) system.

After a highly successful expedition, he presented the US Navy with the hundreds of photographs and notations they had requested — notations that are still referred to by sailors traveling the Alaskan coastline.

Accepting his third Explorers Club flag, in December of 1966 he commanded another yacht, the Enchanter (later renamed the Diana), for the Hubbard Geological Survey Expedition. As announced by the Explorers Club in 1967: “Just recently Mr. Hubbard was again awarded custody of the Explorers Club flag for the Hubbard Geological Survey Expedition. The purpose of this expedition was to find and examine relics and artifacts and so amplify man’s knowledge of history.” Those on board the Enchanter sailed under Ron’s extensive experience through Atlantic and Mediterranean waters, plying the coasts of Sicily, Sardinia and the Grand Canary Islands.

More to the point, as one crew member recalled, Captain Hubbard passed his years of knowledge to his crew. “He had this capability of being able to see an enormous amount of detail, and his background was so big — it wasn’t just on yachting. You could see he was quite capable of handling one of those great big enormous four-masted ships.”

From 1967 through 1975, he wrote volumes of nautical policy and summations of seafaring basics, from how to take proper compass bearings to how to operate radar and what it means to serve as messenger of the watch. This legacy has taught hundreds of crew the basics of seamanship and continues to be used in the training of top-notch ship crews to this day.

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