Navigator to Hydrographer

About the Book

Navigator to Hydrographer is the promised sequel to Mandalay to Norsemen published in 2003, which described the author's seafaring life prior to arriving in Halifax June 1948 as a landed immigrant. The second book tells the tale of his futile attempts to swallow the anchor between voyages around the globe and on the Great Lakes, before becoming a hydrographic surveyor on the west coast of Canada.

His descriptions of the work and the life on board the Wm. J. Stewart and his shipmates on these often hazardous undertakings during the nineteen fifties are well drawn and should appeal to those who remember her as the Willie J".

A new challenges arises - the urgent need to survey the waters of the Western Arctic brought about by the construction of the Distant Early Warning chain of radar stations. The early years working from USS Storis was followed by the Canadian Coastguard Ship Camsell. An abortive venture with the RCMP, and then the arrival of his very own command - the 60-foot long Richardson that he sailed up into the Arctic from Victoria in 1962.

The years that followed in the Arctic had both good ice years and bad ice years that meant long hours of work for Richardson's crew in often trying and quite dangerous conditions. All of this culminated in 1967 when Richardson and her crew almost perished in the Arctic pack off Point Barrow, Alaska. Her survival and rescue by Camsell and Northwind is a classic story in itself.

The author was then promoted to be Regional Hydrographer of Central Region which moved himself and his family to Ottawa and Burlington, Ontario where he describes both the pleasures of management and the stresses and strains within the bureaucracy.

Members of the Canadian Hydrographic Service, past and present, should particularly enjoy this very personal view of their Service.

About the Author

Tom McCulloch was born in Greenock, Scotland in 1925. He went to sea during World War II when he was 16, as a cadet with the Henderson Line of Glasgow. After service at sea in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, he was promoted to Mate in 1944, and then went on to work on cable ships until emigrating to Canada in 1948. He continued his life at sea on Canadian deep sea vessels and on the Great Lakes until 1953 when he joined the Canadian Hydrographic Service as a surveyor. His work was conducted on the coast of British Columbia and in the Western Arctic. In 1968 he became Regional Hydrographer Central Region of Canada, then Director of the region, and in 1979 the Director General of the Bayfield Laboratory in 1985 and was employed as consultant and manager of hydrographic training projects in Malaysia and the Caribbean until 2002 when he took up a new occupation as a writer. His first book, Mandalay to Norseman was published in 2003. He lives in Victoria BC and is the proud father of five and grandfather of 13.