By Paula Tagivetaua
SUVA, Fiji (Fiji Times, Aug. 23, 2011) – In Kaiafa Ledua's home at Caubati, I saw books on navigation and the sea – "Western Navigation" by Lewis, "Pacific Navigation and Voyaging" by Ben R. Finney and "Vaka Moana - Voyages of the Ancestors".

The books told me something about my tovata from Narocivo in Nayau, Lau.

Kaiafa was the navigator of the Uto ni Yalo, the Fijian drua which had just sailed across the Pacific Ocean from Aotearoa to Tahiti and across the Equator to Hawaii.

As navigator, Kaiafa was the man who steered the Fijian drua and crew of 16 through storms, raging seas, dark of night and the still of the doldrums for weeks on end.

They had joined other traditional canoes from Tahiti, Aotearoa, Samoa and the Cook Islands on a sea voyage to retrace the voyage our ancestors took a long time ago.

Kaiafa was the chief officer, sail master and cultural adviser for the Fijian crew on the trip.

He did not use a compass, GPS or chart but steered the Uto ni Yalo using traditional methods and by the stars, sun and moon as his father taught him and from what he learnt at the New Zealand Coastguard Academy at Tauranga. The navigational skills and knowledge was something he inherited from his father and it is in his genes.

Kaiafa is of the mataqali Lemaki - the traditional mataisau of the Tui Nayau. His father was a dau ta waqa and a dau soko - a ship builder and sailor by tradition.

The mataisau have the uncanny ability to steer a Fijian sail boat at night guided by the stars. They have knowledge of the seas, weather, winds, waves, moon and the sun. Kaiafa said he started sailing when he was a kid in the village of Narocivo.

"I remember sailing at night, soko bogi, with my father with the stars as a guide. He knew where to take the boat in the night. He never really taught me except when he told me about the stars and how they could take me anywhere in the world." From the village, Kaiafa came to Suva for secondary education and became a music teacher before he joined the School of Maritime Studies, went to New Zealand and came back. I was sailing alone from Nayau to Tuvuca and Vanuabalavu when I was six," he said. "I am the youngest of six, and my brothers are all sailors, we can build a boat, lali, tanoa and anything from wood. It is our gift."

Kaiafa and his wife Anaseini have three children. Their youngest is named Ocean.

The traditional navigator has turned to studying the stars to widen his horizons and is filtering his knowledge to his daughter. "To be able to precisely steer a canoe to its destination, I have studied and memorized the rising and setting points of hundreds of stars. This includes their path across the sky, their behavior according to the change in latitude."

Anaseini thinks her husband is not all there at times. "I sometimes think my husband is crazy because he would rush out of the house in the middle of the night, and sometimes very early in the morning with his notebook, saying he had just found something new in the sky," she said. He will study the stars at night using his little planetarium at home, doze off to sleep under the rotating stars, wake up, study, doze off again, and continue until morning."

Despite efforts to "re-do what our forefathers were doing, ocean navigation," Kaiafa says, "I have some critics, even from my family, who say I will never be able to replicate what and how the ancients did. They tell me I am more knowledgeable and educated than our forefathers but I brush the comment aside and tell them I still have a lot to learn before I can match the knowledge and skills of my forefathers."

Kaiafa is putting together an autobiography titled Takoso, about his findings on the trip he made on the Uto ni Yalo to Aotearoa and on to Tahiti and Hawaii.

His next mission is a voyage with the Fiji Voyaging Society from Costa Rica in South America to the Galapagos and Cocos Island and back via Tahiti, Rarotonga, Samoa, Tonga then home.

That is something he is looking forward to but everything depends on funding.

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