Ailey Baker

It's 5 o'clock in the morning, and the sun is just coming over the horizon, and I'm sailing a sailing canoe in the middle of the Pacific, 100 miles from land.

Three years ago, I was doing field work in the Micronesia when I met Cesario, one of the last traditional navigators in all of the Pacific.

Cesario doesn't use a GPS.

He doesn't use compass.

He doesn't use maps.

He only uses the stars and the rising sun and the wind and the birds.

Young boys on his island are placed in tide pools at a young age so that they can begin to feel the patterns of water and wind on their bodies.

Some people say that they have the power to call whales to their boat to guide them to their destination, and when it's a moonless night, they can actually call the thunder and lightning so that they can see the sea.

So Cesario invites me on this trip, and there's this one night when the sky is completely covered in fog, and he's steering the boat, only he's not actually facing forward.

He's facing backward and sailing with only a handful of stars in the sky into the mist.

Two days later, after 12 days at sea, we arrive at an island the size of this building.

And being on a sailing canoe is kind of like being on a raft and camping in the middle of the open ocean.

Every person has a bunk and every person has a hammock.

You're six hours on and six hours off, but there's absolutely no shielding you from the elements.

When it's rainy, you're soaked and you're freezing.

And when it's hot, you're completely burning.

And for me, most of the time, I was also ready to throw up.

But Cesario is teaching us so much.

In the morning, he teaches us how to read the clouds so that we can tell the weather.

And at night, he's showing us the storm clouds.