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[Ric Gillespie]

Fred Fuller was an Aviation Machinist Mate aboard USS Colorado during the Earhart search. His son contacted me to say he has a chart his father drew depicting the search (attached below).  It shows a landing at Hull, which is correct, and implies a landing at Sydney, which is not correct.  The chart seems to be based mostly on scuttlebutt.

His son also has a note given to him by one of the pilots as a souvenir.  It says,
YECR V 54D BT
"Have sighted Sydney will reel up in ten minutes and drop down to inspect 0742”

Have no idea what the YECR V 54D BT means, but the message itself seems clear and pretty interesting. The Colorado's planes couldn't communicate with each other except by hand signals, but at least one of the three planes (probably Senior Aviator Lambrecht's) was equipped with an LF transmitter and a trailing wire antenna for sending Morse code back to the ship. This appears to be a note passed by the pilot of one of the search planes to the radio operator in the back seat for transmission to the ship's radio operator. 
Just before 7AM on Saturday July 10, the three O3U-3s were launched to search Sydney Island.  I interpret the message to mean 42 minutes later they had Sydney in sight about ten minutes up ahead.  They had to reel in the trailing wire before they could drop down to inspect the island, but that meant they could not make real-time reports back to the ship during the inspection.

[Randy Conrad]

This is a really neat discovery Ric! In relation to the comments you made about this hand drawn map...one of the things I noticed that there wasnt any plane drawn flying by Gardner and there were two huts drawn on the island. If I'm correct it was documented that a fly over was done and the pilot noticed that the island had the presence of someone being on the island. I know this map might be drawn on a whim but makes you wonder since in the pictures taken of Gardner at the time there were no indications of any huts present on the island.

[Ric Gillespie]

Whatever "signs of recent habitation" Lambrecht saw, it sure wasn't huts (unless Amelia built a couple, which seems rather unlikely).

[Don White]

I saw the huts too, but as the island shown doesn't otherwise resemble Gardner, I considered it artistic license. Maybe the artist had heard that Lambrecht had seen signs of habitation and imagined what that looked like.

[Matt Revington]

I think he may have got his descriptions of McKean and Gardner reversed, a wreck is shown at McKean which is most likely to represent the Norwich City and the huts shown on Gardner are likely the guano mining huts that were standing on McKean

[Arthur Rypinski]

Nice bit of memorabilia.  Neptune and the mermaids are nicely done.

None of the islands on the map, other than Hull, even vaguely resemble their actual counterparts.  Note that Hull is the only island shown with a central lagoon, and also with something resembling its correct shape.