St. Paul Island Dxpedition ( CY9C ) -- Aug 19 - 29, 2016.

CONTACT QSL Manager,  WA4DAN, to REQUEST CARDS DIRECT  (Include Postage and Self Addressed Envelope  --(No IRC's please)) 

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                                                              Previous DXpeditions

Navassa, Desecheo, Sable Island (4), St Paul Island (2), Mellish Reef. Each one of these DXpeditions were very special for a lot of different reasons. Each island (or reef) were unique in their own right. The January 1992 Navassa DXpedition will always be special to me as it was my first major DXpedition. The initial idea for going to Navassa originated during the February 1990 IOTA DXpedition to the Dry Tortugas. Bob KW2P (Silent Key) and Larry K5MK and I were the ops on that DXpedition. We made 3500 contacts over a weekend and had the best time working the pileups. The Dry Tortugas are located approximately 70 miles west of Key West in the Gulf of Mexico. We chartered a fishing boat out of Key West for the 70 mile trip which took seven hours.

While on this trip, we started thinking about where the next adventure would be. I happened to mention Navassa as I remembered working N0TG and W0RJU from there in November 1978. It seemed relatively close so why not! After returning home, I wrote Randy N0TG and asked him about Navassa. I got a response from Randy but it wasn't too encouraging. Not too discouraged, I wrote again in early 1991. I guess Randy sensed we were really serious! He started to be more optimistic, to the point that maybe we could pull this off. I had been on a lot of IOTA DXpeditions but nothing compared to the challenge Navassa would offer.

Randy was a team leader of the 1978 Dxpedition so he knew the difficulties involved. Slowly but surely we made progress working all of the details that comes with a major DXpedition. We needed operators and decided that five would be just the right number. Not too large that it would require too much logistical work, but large enough to be able to satisfy some of the demand for Navassa. It had been four years since the previous KP1 DXpedition so our timing was perfect. Randy asked me if I knew of some potential operators for this adventure. I knew of Ron AA4VK in Raleigh as he had started going on some DX operations. Ron mentioned to me that he knew Will AA4NC as he was local to the Raleigh area and was a big contester. So with just a phone call, I had us two really good ops! Believe it or not this took place in mid-November 1991, just two months before the DXpedition. We had waited on signing up the operators because we wanted to make sure we had all of the necessary details ironed out. So now, the team was set.

The team members would be N0TG, WA4DAN, KW2P, AA4VK and AA4NC. The next two months would be a blur of activity as I had to build two shipping crates and get most of the heavier items shipped to Kingston, Jamaica. My dad W4GDF was really good at woodworking projects so I gave him the task of building the crates. One crate would be rather large and heavy while the second crate would be smaller and lighter. When my dad completed the crates I loaded the gear which included the Honda generator I had used on my IOTA DXpeditions. I transported the crates to RDU and shipped them air cargo to Kingston.