The only possible landing at the island is not a landing in the usual sense of the word but a place where a boat can be held long enough for men to jump on a wire rope ladder that dangles about 40 ft. from a cantilever catwalk. There is constant danger of the boat being broached by the incoming swell, being smashed against the cliff, being caught and crushed under the cliff or being engulfed by the receding backwash. —U.S. Coast Guard Warning
That hint of danger had not dissuaded the nine Americans, most of them normally sedentary landlubbers, from boarding the sturdy 48-ft. fishing trawler Gabriella in Kingston, Jamaica, and heading into the windswept Caribbean on a stomach-churning 124-mile, 15-hour voyage to U.S.-owned Navassa Island, 30 miles west of Haiti. Unaccountably cheerful through the stormy night, the five-man Jamaican crew and the boat's Kingston owner, Gilbert Thompson ("I couldn't trust the responsibility of this trip to just the crew"), kept the craft on course toward its tiny target: a flat-topped limestone rock merely one mile wide and two miles long, with sheer cliffs plunging to the sea. And as the deck of the Gabriella heaved in the 10-ft. waves, so too did many of the Americans.
Why were they spending precious vacation time to live for a week on a hot, deserted pile of boulders and brush? All were amateur radio operators, and each was pursuing the arcane joys of one of that burgeoning hobby's most popular specialties. It is called DXing, meaning long-distance communications. The obsessive goal of diehard DXers is to make at least one contact with each of the 318 "countries" recognized by hams around the world. Under criteria established by the American Radio Relay League, the largest ham organization, Navassa qualifies as one such country because it is more than 225 miles from its governing mainland. But no ham can talk to Navassa unless other amateurs go there to put it on the air. That was the aim of this "DXpedition."
Approaching the island after dawn, the intrepid hams quickly discovered that the Coast Guard's warning had been apt. The wire ladder was there, all right, but the backwash was violent. Transporting gear, including 50 boxes of electronic equipment, three rotatable-beam antennas, two gasoline-powered generators weighing about 150 Ibs. each, plus assorted 20-ft.-long steel pipes, bamboo poles, 250-lb. gasoline drums, kegs of drinking water and a week's food supply, looked impossible. Just getting to the swaying ladder seemed daunting enough.
But the expedition's gruff leader was unfazed. John Ackley (call sign: KP2A) had made a fortune by selling his New Jersey computer firm in 1976, then founded the tax-exempt International DX Foundation to promote worldwide good will by sponsoring such DXpeditions. His foundation had supplied all of the radio gear, while the trip's cost (more than $10,000) was split among the nine operators. Ackley set off with two crewmen in a 12-ft. dinghy, powered by a 25-h.p. outboard motor. One crewman skillfully maneuvered the tiny craft through the heavy seas to put Ackley at the ladder on the crest of a wave. He scrambled up the 16 suspended steps—and the ladder held.