February 25, 2012

If feels like it’s been awhile since I’ve written, but it really hasn’t. The stars have been incredible since it’s the new moon, and I don’t know if there’s a lot of particulate matter in the atmosphere or what, but the shooting stars have been more numerous and their tails have been long and bright. Stars are becoming ever more important on this leg of our trip, as I will expand upon in a bit. And the bioluminescence is just awesome to me. I cannot stop looking at it. Last night we actually shut off the motor and were sailing under a Force 4 wind, with most of our sails set. Wind! Real wind for the first time! We were making about 6.5 knots and hour, which doesn’t sound like much, but over the course of a day it adds up to roughly 120 nautical miles.  

Anyway, stronger winds meant bigger waves and a greater disturbance when Mama Seamans cut through the water, agitating a great deal of bioluminescent creatures. The other night we had mid watch and every mid watch it’s someone’s lucky job to clean the galley. It was my turn. Galley cleanup sucks. I tried to go in with a positive attitude, but it’s basically you becoming intimate friends with the galley by spending 3 hours in there, cleaning every surface. That includes the floor, which means carrying up these awkward, heavy black mats that leave marks on the soles, the bulkheads, your clothing, and your skin, up to the deck and cleaning them. So, I was doing that with the saltwater hose and I noticed there was bioluminescence coming out. Made my night a whole lot better. Let me tell you though, I did my job. That griddle and those surfaces have never been cleaner. I treated myself to a 3 am shower and change of sheets that night which was so nice. I have decided upon a new rule: I must at least rinse off all the grime before I get into bed, because it’s pretty nasty. I did laundry today and (you might not want to read this), the water was actually gray. Plus, it took me about an hour to wash, rinse, wring, and hang everything. Here is the tried and true method of laundry: attach the freshwater hose to the spigot. Put some detergent in the 5-gallon bucket. Spray to create as many bubble as possible. Stuff your clothes in (some things never change for college students). Remove shoes to stomp on your clothes like they are grapes and you’re making wine. Add more water. Remove clothes and wring. Pour water over the side and refill with rinse water. Rinse clothes and wring. Hang on lines attached at random points around the ship. Hope nothing flies into the ocean.  Makes me appreciate washing machines a whole lot more. However, the smell that results from hanging your clothes in the sea air is quite nice.

So, today was laundry day. C watch also took the opportunity to dress “snautical” snobby nautical. We had a mini photo shoot on deck modeling our outfits, and let me just say it’s quite the experience to furl sails wearing a skirt. It was also “learn how to use a sextant” day. Now, the sextant existed as this mysterious tool that, in my mind, I would never be able to learn how to use because it involves geometry and trig (HORRORS!) But actually it wasn’t that bad. Of course, I don’t know any of the theory or actual mathematical equations behind what we’re figuring out, but I don’t need to know how to do those to use one, luckily. When you use a sextant, you ‘shoot’ whatever object you want to use to get a line of position. Yesterday we shot the sun, and this morning for dawn watch we shot the stars. I learned how to calculate declination of the sun, when it’s rising or setting (which involves a whole lot of steps, converting from time to Greenwich Mean Time to Local Mean Time), and then as a watch we figured out our ship’s bearing using the knowledge of what direction it rises and sets, the declination, and our fists, which are approximately 10 degrees. A bit of addition and you have a number that should be pretty close to the ship’s bearing. Pretty cool. Shooting the stars and the sun is more for figuring out our Line of Position (LOP). That means knowing our approximate position without using any modern instruments. The way I see it, the first leg of our journey was spent getting used to the boat, how to plot our course, read a GPS, use the compass to steer, and learning a couple stars. Now we’re sort of regressing to the days of yore, before electronically navigation, and we’re spending this leg using sextants and the heavenly bodies to find our longitude and latitude, and combining this with our log to figure a DR, or deduced reckoning on the chart. The way we figure out our log is rather unique. We call it the Muffin Log because originally we started using this method by throwing galley trash over the side and timing how long it took to get from point A to point B. We’re not supposed to share that with anyone because if word gets out, we’ll become the laughingstock of the maritime world. Now we just use the bubbles of the boat, and I don’t think any of us have gotten the timing down exactly (we convert the seconds counted to knots), but we come pretty close. Using the Muffin Log and the course we’ve been steering, we approximate our position on the chart based off the last hourly position and that is our DR. It’s remarkably close to the GPS fixing.

Our final leg we will be turning off most instruments, electronic or not, and ideally using just the sky, our senses, and the knowledge we’ve gained to steer by. Polynesian navigation, essentially, and what we’ve been working towards. Sounds pretty romantic, doesn’t it? I’m slightly intimidated. Slightly. But I think each of us on the watch has enough knowledge that we can rely on each other and come up with some pretty accurate information. Plus, it’s good to know the mates and captain won’t let us do anything that will put us in danger.

I have a funny story. The other night I was sitting in the main saloon doing some homework and some of our professors and crew were playing a card game, Whist. I asked if they knew how to play Euchre, and our chief scientist (jokingly) dissed the game. I jumped on the defensive, a few words were (jokingly) exchanged, and now whenever I’m sarcastic, the captain makes fun of me for being feisty. He said he thought people from the Midwest were supposed to be mild mannered. Ha! I must defend my Euchre.

Wind!

DRs on the chart

C Watch goes Snautical

Oh so preppy