25°08' W
0615 UT
20.2.08
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overcast. a grey night with a waxing gibbous moon. i just like saying that. also typing it. pretty nearly full though, and that moon totally lit everything up from above. no real need to save the night vision tonight. cap'n m says that it takes half an hour to recover the night vision after en encounter with a bright light. seems reasonable, based on what i've seen.
short story about the reasons we wear our harnesses on watch at night: once upon a time there was a slightly disreputable south african delivery company. (what we are doing, the unglamourous version anyway, is that we're the delivery crew for this boat... a temporary addition to the permanent crew who are on for the duration.) they hadn't yet invented safety procedures and habitually left the cockpit at night without lifejackets/harnesses. one morning the watch relief woke to find dude had set out his have-a-shower rig on the back part of the boat, shampoo, towel soap et cetera. no dude. a reminder that 50% of overboards even in this day and age are lost and not coming back. so we're told that they're not lifejackets: they're harnesses, wear them and clip in. and on a 3 hour solo watch, that's potentially a long time before anyone even thinks that someone might be missing.
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that's enough of the doom and gloom. a digression to help balance off the overly wonder-years flavour of my last division.
tonight, more reading in lieu of television. also tonight i was continuing to wrestle with the maxsea software. it's still being a poo, and for the moment at least i am out of patience tickets. more tomorrow or perhaps the next day. it works fine on the ship computer, but the plan is to have redundant systems for all navigation and communication stuff. safer and all that. maxsea is already a redundant (not unnecessary but more like extra) system but hey, more is sometimes better. we actually do use a pencil and a paper chart. and one of them nifty rulers with the dial in the middle. i have one but mostly have only used it historically to make lines so i could write down banjo tablature for el banj.
from the atlantic crossing guide:
so it seems like have more than one plan is a great idea. celestial navigation requires know how, a sextant, an accurate chronometer and some tables on what should be where at what time. apparently these used to be published in an almanac thing, and were also probably in cruising guides until GPS became popular and systems like LORAN were phased out. i wonder if anyone actually has a windy-uppy watch on board.
still curious about that celestial nav stuff. different than merely steering by a star, which we did when the autopilot was broke. nice to have it back, though a 3 hour watch seemed to go a great deal faster when one had to continually focus. this way, we get less off course i bet though. and we're officially in race mode, as we lost 30 knots a day for about 3 days when we were awaiting the part in las palmas. and i hear that antigua is an even better place to have a day off than on gran canaria.
