Where's the boat?" Alph signaled. As part of the PADI Underwater Navigator course, I'd asked him to guide us back to the boat on the bottom. Only he blew it. To say I was disappointed is an understatement. He and his buddy, Kendra, were very promising students, something I realized based on their underwater skills and (more importantly) their willingness to accept anything I say as gospel. Since Alph and Kendra hadn't found the boat, it was up to me. With plenty of air left (we were only 25 feet deep), this would be an opportunity to learn from my vastly superior experienced compass-navigation talent. "You stay here, I'm going up to look," I signaled. This was no problem since we had 100 feet of viz and we'd be able to see each other. At the surface, I found the boat, gave the Big OK, set a compass heading and went back down. "Watch me," I gestured. In Role Model Instructor pose, I aligned my spine with the lubber line, straight as a bird dog on point. Making sure A and K were along, off I went, exhibiting complete confidence. It would have been an idyllic, nearly perfect nav demo — had we actually reached the boat. But after 150 kick cycles, I suspected something was amiss. "Where's the boat?" Kendra signaled. The mockery in her eyes nudged her down two pegs on my promising student scale. "Wait here," I signaled. Repeating the surface-for-a-bearing drill, I took another heading and descended to, unfortunately, repeat my performance. I repeated it exactly — including not finding the boat. Why Alph and Kendra found it funny was beyond me, but it knocked them down another point on the promising student scale. The third try got us back to the boat. Sort of. I missed again, but now we were low on air so we had to swim back on the surface. "Good dive?" asked the divemaster. "Oh, yeah, it was wonderful," agreed Alph and Kendra, earning themselves two more demerits. After getting out of our gear, I debriefed Alph and Kendra about their performance on the patterns they'd navigated quite successfully during the first part of the dive. Then I turned our attention to the difficulty finding the boat in four runs (Alph's one and my three) in 100 feet of visibility. After explaining what we'd been trying to do, I offered a hypothesis. "Even a highly skilled, experienced, proficient genius navigational wizard can have difficulties," I said calmly. Holding up one of my fins, I went on. "See this nick? It gave my right fin slightly less surface area than the left. So, with each kick, I must have been turning imperceptibly to the right." Both jumped back to the top of promising student scale by laughing more heartily than they should have at my jest. It was the divemaster, however, who answered our riddle. "All your runs were straight," he said. "But the wind's been shifting, blowing the boat around the anchor. You'd take a heading but the boat would swing 300 feet away before you got there." "An important lesson here," I observed. "What's that?" "It's hard to hit a moving target." "Duh," said Kendra, instantly losing two points.