War Patrol help anyone?

[garihood]

Hello all.

I've got a sort of generic question about war patrols. I'm doing my first one and am clueless about whether my approach is right or wrong. Here's the skinny:

I don't have the game (or the manual) in front of me, so I apologize for not being able to give the patrol's name. It's the earliest one (1941) out of the Philippines where you are sent to a point north of Luzon and then asked to engage a landing fleet.

Well, here's what I've done. I sunk a few merchants on my way up to the "star". I got there and received the news that I was to engage an enemy landing/invasion fleet. My first questions to myself were, "Where in the wide ocean is the invasion going to be? Should I stay withing 50nm of this spot and wait? Or should I go out hunting?"

I cruised all over the area (within 50nm) around the star for days, not spotting a single Japanese ship, the only contact being with some annoying airplanes. Meantime, I'm getting a boatload of contact reports, but most of them are hundreds of miles away from what I believe is my patrol area.

So the question is this: Do I stay in the area that the mission orders put me and wait for this fleet to come to me, or do I go out and find it? And if I need to go out and find it, how am I supposed to tell which of the many contact reports I get is the one I'm supposed to concentrate on?

Incidentally, on these war patrols, how long are you typically supposed to wait before the objective can be accomplished? On this particular patrol I've been out for several days now.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

P.S. Has anyone written up a guide for these patrols? Not a walkthrough necessarily - I want to do as much by myself as I can, but at least a little something to make up for the absence of any help from the manual.