Word: rafts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Rather he is testing a scientific theory and the trip to Cambridge is just a side event. A student of Polynesian anthoropology, the New Zealander believes that the raft "Kon-Tiki" which drifted from Peru to Tahiti could have made a round trip merely by switching currents...
...raft Kon-Tiki, which drifted across the Pacific from Peru to the Raroia Reef near Tahiti, may have been traveling a two-way highway. This is the theory of Dr. Thomas Davis of New Zealand, who believes that Polynesians made the roundtrip passage in great sailing canoes. If they stayed far enough south, they were helped by the prevailing winds and currents that cross that part of the Pacific from west to east. On the return trip, they were able to use the same winds and currents that favored the Kon-Tiki on its crossing near the equator. In fact...
Moores quickly unloaded a rubber raft, paddled out into the lake and started fishing in earnest. Says he: "I made five casts and I hooked five trout, none of which could have weighed less than eight pounds. There's no other place in the world you can do that. Of the five, I boated three. The biggest was a 25-pounder and the smallest was twelve. And I got them all in just over an hour. I sat there looking at those beautiful big trout and thinking of all the years I've spent boasting about an eight...
...Washington, the Civil Aeronautics Administration hastily ordered the plane's operator, North Continent Airlines, to cease operations immediately. They admitted that the operators had been under investigation for a year, charged with a raft of safety violations. With a strange sense of leniency, the civil air authorities had allowed the line to stay in business pending an official hearing...
...those chaotic last moments, a Minnesota couple passed their two-year-old son through a window to a life raft, then were trapped in the sinking plane. Lieut. Commander John Natwing leaped from a Coast Guard amphibian that landed at the scene, seized one drowning passenger, and fought off sharks for half an hour until they were both pulled to safety. Another hero was the DC-4's captain. He helped some passengers out of the plane and managed to float four life rafts before the plane sank. He hauled a baby and an elderly woman to a raft...