DIF

first day at sea.

40°55' N
2°39'E


we're just past valencia and in la mar balearico, between corsica and spain. the stars are incredible and i was very pleased to see the moon rise during my watch ths morning. i have volunteered .. perhaps wisely, perhaps not, for the 3AM - 6 AM watch.

perhaps i am a masochist, making this business as stressful as possible. thinking that i decided it would be a great idea to try the fish soup and the duck pâté before the first afternoon watch at sea. moderate seas are nothing like moderate lake of the woods, to say the least. the catamaran is pretty forgiving and all from side to side, which is to say there is not a great deal of heeling, but it does give ya quite the spanking front to backways. up and down and up and down all the time. we got fairly spanked during that first lunch. an eye opener. the biggest october day on the lake is 'moderate' by mediterranean standards.

sleeping has been going well, and thus far i have been holding onto my lunch. a good experiment. we have access to the best binocs i have yet encountered and they have this really funky feature.. image stablizer. wild. it seems to blur things out a bit, but then i am a tad obsessive about focus, i am doing my best to get my response time up when observing.

fujinon techno stabi 14 x 40 4°.

found a new deep space object in the thingy dangling from the belt of orion. not on my watch, of course; i was busy looking at ships and monitoring instruments at that point. random statistic, 5 minutes after a ship is not visible on the horizon, if y'all are on a collision course, ya might be collidin', provided that those five minutes are all when said ship is in your blind spot. on watch it's important to be relocating every now and again (every two or three minutes) so as to eliminate them blind spots. the deep space thingy was on the watch of miss rose. i went out after dinner was done and donned the binocs, clipped myself in and splayed out on the foredeck by the trampoline for some comfy relaxy observing. we took a look out for corsica and for a few tankers as well. they're totally huge. each a behemoth. and there's shipping galore in the med.

more on DSOs. in the litle star cluster hanging from orion, there's most definitely a cloud of luminscent gas in the middle.. some kind of nebula. very cool. and not terribly visible in manitoba in winter.. i'd likely be able to see it from the cabin by the whiteshell with the telescope there, but it's way less favourable for viewing due to our provinvce's temperature. it's a dry cold. you can dress for it. but that's a more ambitious thing. you can also dress for watch, but it's easy to underestimate how cold it is. or how warm it's not. humidity makes a big diff. so far, i am dressing for driving a boat in november in ontario and it's working just fine. the coldest i have been thus far was after one of my many recreational swims in la grande motte to retrieve one of many key items that failed the DIF* test.

the sea temp claimed to be just under 10°C, but that might have been a surface temp. air in the morning was around 0°C and my swim that day was well before things warmed to the balmy 12°C or so we got in the sunny afternoons. i got good and burnt on our first afternoon and now am once again nerdy about screening, even on cloudy days.


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*Does It Float?