Rose of the Winds Mystery Cache

NOTE: This cache is 1 of 16 associated with the Ol' Salty Dog's Maritime Mixer cache series.

Find your way to the physical cache container at the coordinates revealed by solving the puzzle below. In the physical cache container, attached to the log, you will find a "puzzle piece" that will get you one step closer to finding Ol' Salty Dog's Maritime Mixer.

The compass rose is a figure on a compass, map, nautical chart, or monument used to display the orientation of the cardinal directions (north, south, east, west) and their intermediate points. There is no absolute standard for creating a compass rose, and each school of cartographers seems to have developed their own standards through history, and there are a multitude of different variations of the compass rose design that have been developed and utilized over the centuries.

Anthropological studies have shown that most ancient cultures recognized the four points of cardinal direction. Voyaging populations tended to adopt sunrise and sunset for East and West and the direction from where different winds blow to denote North and South. The ancient Greeks maintained distinct and separate systems of four cardinal points and four winds. Aristotle identified ten distinct winds. The Romans adopted the later Greek 12-wind system, and replaced its names with Latin equivalents. The Frankish king Charlemagne came up with his own names for the classical 12 winds.

Before the end of the 10th century, Arab navigators in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, who depended on celestial navigation, were using a 32-point sidereal compass rose which demarcates the compass points by the position of stars in the night sky, rather than winds. In Europe, the Classical 12-wind system continued to be taught in academic settings during the Medieval era, but seafarers in the Mediterranean came up with their own distinct 8-wind system.

On the earliest medieval nautical charts of the 14th century, compass roses were depicted as mere collections of color-coded compass rhumb lines. On the Catalan Atlas of 1375, the most important map of the medieval period, is the first known ornate compass rose. By the end of the 15th century, Portuguese cartographers began drawing multiple ornate compass roses throughout their charts.

The modern compass rose has eight principal winds; four cardinal directions and four intercardinal (or ordinal) directions. The contemporary compass rose appears as two rings, one smaller and set inside the other. The outside ring denotes true cardinal directions with true north referring to the geographical location of the north pole. The smaller inside ring denotes magnetic cardinal directions with magnetic north referring to the direction towards which the north pole of a magnetic object, such as a compass, will point.

One variance of the compass rose is the 32-wind compass rose. This variance is formed from the eight principal winds, the eight half-winds, and the sixteen quarter-winds. The eight principal winds consist of the four cardinal directions: north (N), east (E), south (S), west (W); and the four intercardinal (or ordinal) directions: northeast (NE), southeast (SE), southwest (SW) and northwest (NW). The eight half-winds are the direction points obtained by bisecting the angles between the principal winds: north-northeast (NNE), east-northeast (ENE), east-southeast (ESE), south-southeast (SSE), south-southwest (SSW), west-southwest (WSW), west-northwest (WNW) and north-northwest (NNW).

The sixteen quarter-winds are the direction points obtained by bisecting the angles between the eight principal winds and eight half-winds. The name of a quarter-wind is X by Y, where X is the closest principal wind, the four cardinals and four intercardinals considered together, and Y is the closest cardinal wind. The quarter-winds are: north by east (NbE), northeast by north (NEbN), northeast by east (NEbE), and east by north (EbN); east by south (EbS), southeast by east (SEbE), southeast by south (SEbS), and south by east (SbE); south by west (SbW), southwest by south (SWbS), southwest by west (SWbW), and west by south (WbS); and west by north (WbN), northwest by west (NWbW), northwest by north (NWbN), and north by west (NbW). Each compass direction point on the 32-wind compass rose is at an 11 1⁄4° angle from the next.

Listed below are eight direction points on the 32-wind compass rose. Utilize your sleuthing skills and determine the angle or heading on the compass rose that corresponds with each of these direction points. Once the angle has been determined, drop any numbers to the right of the decimal or any fraction. The last digit of the remaining whole angle number (annotated as A through H) will provide the needed number for each missing decimal minute digit of this puzzle cache's coordinates.