February 22, 2012

Just got off of evening watch, which is from 1900-2300. I spent over an hour at bow watch and took the helm twice. Steering is one of the things I find most difficult. The rudder responds differently depending on whether we’re motoring or not and what point of sail we’re on. We were going mostly downwind this watch, which I hadn’t steered before. It’s interesting because in small boat sailing, you’re constantly tacking, but on the Seamans, we’ll spend a whole day, if not more, on one tack. We gybe way more often than we tack, and it’s almost always for science deployments.

            After dawn watch, a bunch of my watch went onto the quarter deck and did a deck of cards workout. Each card has an ab exercise associated with it and ideally you work your way through the whole deck. Ideally. I think you get a double ab workout due to the rolling of the ship. After lunch was field day, when we break up into watches and tackle the cleaning of the whole ship. There is general consensus that everyone on the ship should shave their heads because the hair we collect is disgusting. It gets all wound up in your fingers and your wash buckets and is really hard to get off the sponges. At least we get to listen to music, the only time we can play it outside of our bunks, and each section of the boat has a very distinct genre. It’s fun to walk through and hear everything. We ended with “And We Danced” with all of us dancing and singing it before heading up on deck in our swimsuits to be blasted with the fire hose. Basically we had a giant group shower on deck and there was soap and salt water everywhere. Someone said the water coming off our bodies and flowing through the scuppers (like eave troughs) was gray. We were also treated with frozen mini candy bars, which Laurie brings around in a basket lined with a napkin. We’re always glad to see her.

            Right before dinner, I was working on some readings in the main saloon when one of the members of my watch came by with his harness on, which meant he was going aloft to watch the sunset. Kaitlin and I sped read through our readings on Cook and Kiritimati, grabbed our harnesses, and joined Marty up on deck. We checked in, then free climbed to the course yard. I climbed up to the tops’l yard, the second highest spot. Next step: the very top of the forem’st. It is quite scary being up there, but absolutely worth it. The ocean looks so large from above, and the sunset was beautiful. Sean had sent out a ‘green flash alert’ and the cloud cover was finally light enough at the horizon that there was a good possibility. We watched the sun rapidly sink, then heard cheers from deck, indicating they had seen a green flash. The sun was still above the horizon for us aloft, however, and we had about a 30 second lag time before we, too, saw the green flash! I’m still a bit skeptical that it’s not just a result of looking at the sun for too long, because after the sun set I was still seeing about 13 green half circles when I closed my eyes, but it’s a cool phenomena if it is real. (I just looked it up in a meteorology book and it apparently is a legit thing.)

Keeks and Lissy 

View from the forem'st

The bow with the mainstays'l and the jib

Course yard

Climbing the ratlines