0625 UT
21.2.08
___________________________
21°52' N
total lunar eclipse tonight. i think i may have missed out on the bulk of the total part, as i noticed a crescent when we should have seen either waxing gibbous or some version of full. but it was mostly totally overcast all night. my first comments upon waking were that it was to be 'another featureless night;' boy, was i ever wrong about that one. when i did notice the moon, i pointed at it and jenny agreed it was cool (she wrote that in the log); but it was nearly half an hour after she was off watch until i realized that the sky around it was clear and it was still obscured. meaning, eclipse. it was red-ish not red, but certainly it was dark enough to see deep space objects in cancer and in the surrounding constellations. i pulled out the binocs as the earth's shadow retreated. the astromoly program i have been using on the flaptop agreed that there was a lunar eclipse. fun.
this would mean that there would have also been an eclipse of saturn, which was also in leo at the time of the lunar eclipse. less spectacular without a telescope. also there's the part where we are on a boat and constantly moving from side to side, and from front to back. the humour of still having the level aboard, the irony of living without light pollution. zero boats, zero airplanes. i am tempted to say zero sattelites, but i figger that i am just not seeing the ones that are there. their orbits must be quite high, and GPS sattelites are geosynchronous, so it'd be way harder to spot them.
some photos of the eclipse. oh yeah. the boat is moving, so they're... creative. david ashcroft calls this a 'design feature.'
tonight was a watch entirely under sail. for a change! a great change. more satisfying sounds, and far more interesting even on autopilot.
we're flying an assymetrical spinnaker sail in addition to the gennaker sail. gennaker is like a giant jib (foresail) but sort of different. it's a hybrid of the genoa (a GIANT foresail, usually bigger than the main) and a spinnaker (only used for running, or if assymetrical for downwind tacks); the genny doesn't like to go upwind, and for that we have a second foresail, the 'solent.' i think genoa is named for the region from which it originated, as is the solent. they're both kind of boaty places. we also have a mainsail, but because we're a catamaran we use running backstays and it's not a great idea to sail on a run using the main. and way less effective anyway than what we're currently flying. more sail area = more velocity = more time in antigua before flying home... (flying home to winnipeg. now, that's a vacation).
so as far as somthing significant to do goes, the wind has been moving around a bit; we sailed 241° for a while and apparently had been as high as 272°. 30 degrees is a lot of variance for this part of the world and time of year. even on autopilot, sometimes you gotta change course to accommodate a wind shift.
i think this afternoon we were on exactly the same heading for my entire watch, though i did duck out to make some plumbings. i think i mentioned that i'd been getting to know the water system and playing with jubilee clips (hose clamps, but with a fancier name - UK style). why do i volunteer for them jobs? probably because i'll learn more. today i also made a 12 V extension cord, though i felt as though i was reinventing the wheel in order to clean up a tiny mess. being task-oriented, and having completed the first bit in a multistage process, i thought i'd make some fake cleanup along the way so that the real cleanup would not be so taxing when it was all said and done.
i made a little fine art project out of carving some hardwood bits to cover some sharp sticky-outy bits on the back of the bimini. bimini is a thing that keeps the weather out of the cockpit. sort of like a canopy, but likely named for the region in which it first appeared. this one is rigid, you can stand on it and that's where fully half of our solar panels live. high-tech. anyway, i made a bunch of sawdust and needed to clean the shop a little (one of my favourite activities is to clean up sawdust, ask the shilling people). vacuum no reachy. hence, an extension cord.
tomorrow: affix the fine art project into it's (their) new home(s). eat the cookies i baked while on watch. i hid them this time so that they'd be eaten after lunch instread of for breakfast. chocolate apricot (but say it like ape-ricot).
