In the Caribbean: Hams and Goats

• Share

(3 of 3)

By week's end 33,552 hams from as fir as Australia and from as unlikely a place as Tristan da Cunha, a South Atlantic island, had radioed Navassa. The repeated shouts of "Thanks for the new country" were satisfying. But each opera tor had a more personal reason for coming to that Godforsaken rock. "It's the only adventure left to me in this hobby," explained Bob Schenck (N2OO), a telephone-switching specialist from Tuckerton, NJ. Two years ago, Schenck and Ackley went on a DXpedition to Spratly Island, in the South China Sea, and got more adventure than they sought. Their boat was fired on by Vietnamese artillery. "It's an ego thing—a whole lot of people get to know your call," said Jim Dionne (K1MEM), a computer expert from Westwood, Mass. "My life was in a rut," added Terry Baxter (N6CW), an avionics technician from La Mesa, Calif., who has made contact with all but two of the countries. "I told my wife, this is something I've got to do."

The most savvy operator on Navassa was Bob Denniston, 63. A former president of national and international ham organizations, he owns a small hotel on Tortola in the British Virgin Islands and a home in Iowa, and has apt call letters, W0DX. A bearded gent in a pith hel met, Denniston organized two DXpeditions to Clipperton Island, a forbidding rock in the Pacific, 1 ,800 miles west of the Panama Canal, putting it on the air for the first time in 1954. He went twice in the 1960s to Malpelo Island, 310 miles west of Colombia, initiating the first ham operations there. The mountainside radio sites on Malpelo were pitched at a 45° angle, and one ham survived a fall into the sea only because his life jacket kept his unconscious body afloat. To Denniston, there is nothing like taking charge of a frequency and controlling all those frantic callers. "I love working a pile-up," he says.

Throughout the hams' stay on Navassa, the sea remained surprisingly calm. But when they broke camp and boarded the Gabriella once again, the winds howled anew and stomachs turned queasy. "I keep asking myself, why do I do this?" muttered Al Fischer (K8CW) of Mansfield, Ohio. But for the one novice DXer aboard, the trip proved fatal. The goat whose baaa was heard round the world was served up as mutton Stew.

—By Magnuson Magnuson (W21JB)