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noticed me and I thought ‘somewhere, someone is watching me.’ What a nice
target I’d be for a rancher having a bad day” (Taylor 2000). A sea captain sailing
off the coast of Cameroon writes of the dangers of the sea below:
The waters of the Gulf of Guinea and the Bight of Biafra are full of
dangerous marine animals. First of all there are the evil jellyfish,
such as the "Portuguese Man-of-War" and the "Lion's Mane".
These are present in large number where they drift with the current
and the wind. Contact with the tentacles of these jellyfish results in
a painful sting, which may be fatal (Kokorev, Peter, and Smirnov
2002).
This paragraph reads like a travelogue from the Age of Exploration. Yet beyond
the heroic language of adventure and exploration, there is also the sheer, child-
like joy of going outside to look for something. A visitor to 28S, 27E in South
Africa writes:
While my colleague busied himself with pictures I took stock of our
surroundings and decided, that we truly have seasons in the sun
when grown men can be out and about on touring on motorcycles,
looking for an esoteric point like this confluence of lines of latitude
and longitude in a field of sunflowers, in the Orange Free State,
under the blued vault of a Southern African sky (Gardner and Short
2002).
There are clearly many motivations and joys to be found in the world of
confluence hunting.
DCP participants know exactly where they are going on the globe, but
they don’t necessarily know what they will find there:
One thing that I like a lot about Confluence hunting is that this is a
place that you have never seen (and many times will never see
again), that you know exactly where it is, you do not how to get
there but will find a way and, no matter how it turns out to be you
will be so glad and satisfied to have been there
(http://www.confluence.org/faq.php)!
Convention