July 12 /43.

Dear Mother:

The registered letter is still travelling and is on its way to the Bahamas now, forwarded from Lachine, Que. They sent off a teletype today to find out about it but it only got as far as the border and had to come back to be coded.

I haven’t got the parcel yet but it should have come in to town last Saturday so perhaps they have just forgotten to notify me.

I was navigator on a very busy trip this morning. We flew over to Pictou and there did a harbor reconnaissance. Your given a blank map and in twelve minutes you have to put in all data, type of ships, weight, colour, position etc etc also trains railways roads oil tanks, everything and take some photographs. Both navigators work on this, scurrying around the plane like mad trying to get a decent view. Then you spend the rest of the trip writing up a comprehensive report. But they make the return trip tough by giving you a radius of action to do. In this you set course from the harbor on a given track and fly out to such a point from which you can fly home in a straight line, the whole trip to take a specified length of time. I got back with 3 minutes of the two hours but made a bad arithmetical blunder which caused us to go far off course.

Maybe Archie can figure this out. I wanted a track of 259 and figured course of 27° would give this. Then I found drift was 6 port which made (270-6) = track of 264 requiring alteration of 5 port. However I got 270-6=254, therefore gave alteration of 259-254=5 starboard and so was going 10° off course. Didn’t notice it for 15 minutes.

We had our final written photography exam last week. It was very easy, class average 85% and four of us got 39/40. The other 60 marks go on practical work such as the pictures we took this morning.

It was in the papers so I guess I can mention one of our planes ditched last week. All the crew spent 24 hours in their dinghy before they were found. Remember I said last week how hard it rained. Well that was the night so it must have been pretty miserable.

I suppose you might tell the time with a sextant but it would be very difficult as the tables don’t work so easily backwards.

Your estimate of the length of our trips was very close.

We are having real summer weather now.

With love from
Tony.

There is still another namesake on the station. This time an F/O with different initials. However it might be good to use my number which is now J26815. T.

[Note: Transcription provided by collection donor.]