Last night, I was sitting in my Jeep waiting for my son to finish something and I pulled out my CQ Magazine. There was a really great spread on a team that ran a DX expedition to the British Virgin Islands. They were chasing the ghost of an Englishman who fixed up a sailboat and headed out to see the world on his own. He made a lot of contacts as he rounded the islands and was on the air for quite a while.
I’m a sucker for tales of Englishmen who head out into the world to chase something like that. It’s back to being a conquistador of the useless (a reference for those into the climbing scene of which I am decidedly only a spectator). There is no good reason for going out to sea like that. Even less to poke around with a radio. And less still to go to an island with the express purpose of being someone for people who are in their homes to call. But being useful isn’t much of an end, is it? Not most of the time, I don’t think.
I watch these folks go out and try to ship themselves and their gear to all parts of the world to sit on a lonely island in potentially harsh conditions simply to say “I’m here! Can you hear me? I can hear you!”
Living now, in the After (and there are so many things that have ended in the past few years that this is most assuredly an After Time), it’s easy to see why someone would want to drop it all and wander off. There is very little to be seen or gained from the vantage point of a computer screen.
Fishing. Geocaching. Camping. Overlanding. SOTA. POTA. Any kind of field radio, really. All excuses to get outside and check a box on a list you made yourself that is accountable to no one else. And that serves no greater purpose than to be logged in your own, personal journal.
No, I don’t have any maps open on my desk. Why do you ask?
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