I had the very good fortune to get a call less than two weeks ago from a sailor who needed a watchkeeper for a yacht delivery from Tortola to Rhode Island. He called Sunday, and it took me all of about one nano-second to accept the non-paying position but with all travelling expenses and daily provisions covered by the owner. Arrived on board the Isabel at Soper's Hole on the following Thursday one full day before the captain and other watchkeeper. The Isabel, a 47 footer fitted with a genoa, a self-tacking staysail, an in-mast furling mainsail and motorized winches, is seven years old and has made this trip for each of her seven years. The captain, Robert, is a veteran sailor in his late 50's with over 250000 nm in his log and has delivered the Isabel to and fro for the owners for past 6 years. So, with all the experience he has, he's the ideal fellow to have on board in command. The other watchkeeper is Jim, a United Nations peace keeping intelligence officer on holiday who is five months away from retirement and itching to accumulate enough sea days to obtain his RYA yacht master certification. Robert's on the 4-8 watch, Jim's on the 12-4, and I have the 8-12. We're each responsible for making our own breakfast and lunch, but we take turns cooking a proper meal which we share together every evening in the cockpit. Robert's only stipulation is that it must be a meal which can be served in a bowl for ease of ingestion. So far, the meals have been great, although cooking on the stove can sometimes be quite a challenge when we're heeled well over in a stiff wind and rolling with the waves! Except for the common meal, we are, for the most part, during our watch, alone in the cockpit responsible for keeping the course, trimming the sails and collision avoidance and then we goof off for 8 hours until our watch rolls around again. Loving it! Our course is pretty well due north which makes the sailing easy...we just set the sails and leave them until the wind veers around to the other side which has happened only once so far in this first 5 day leg of the voyage. Since departing Tortola we have had only three visual targets, well spaced apart. Two days ago, the Amuraborg was heading south 8 miles to our starboard (east) and another, the Hammonia Malta (!) was heading west across our bow at a distance of 7 miles. Those were both during my night watch, but separated in time by abt 90 minutes. The third, the Nord Ranger, heading south-east crossed our bow at a distance of 3 miles this morning at the end of Robert's watch. The Isabel is equipped with AIS which picks up the targets and places them on an electronic chart display indicating the ship's name, speed, direction, length and beam, closest point of approach (cpa) and time to the cpa. It's really neat, and so much easier than the old days of plotting targets on the radar. This technology is already seven years old (same age as the Isabel), so I imagine that modern systems must be something quite extraordinary. I miss the old chart work which was always fun as well as reassuring, but this new age aid to navigation is so easy and reliable that it's a vast improvement over the old techniques and should prove to make navigation safer than ever before. Anyway, you might be able to imagine that the lack of traffic on this route makes it seem as if we have the entire ocean to ourselves which allows the mind to wander freely as the eyes scan nothing but sky and water, stars and clouds and waves. So, the other night, my mind wandered haphazardly into a discovery of a formula which I found quite interesting. It's nothing extraordinary and, as you'll note when you see it, pretty obvious. In fact, it's probably something learned in highschool and long forgotten, but fun nevertheless to stumble upon it in free thought. It applies to the complementary fractions of square roots:
X = the square (eg 36)
S = the square root (eg 6)
n = the denominator of the fraction
X = 1/nS * nS
Eg:
X = S x S
X = 36 = 6 x 6
= 1/2 S * 2S = 3 x 12
= 1/3 S x 3S = 2 x 18
= 1/4 S x 4S = 1.5 x 24
= 1/6 S x 6S = 1 x 36
There's no practical value in this beyond entertaining an idle mind and perhaps corroborating the old sailing expression, there are more ways than one to skin a cat.
We should be arriving in Bermuda this evening at which point you may get this message if I can find wifi. We'll be stopping there for fuel and provisions while awaiting an appropriate weather window for the final leg up to Newport and across the Gulf Stream (a tricky bit of business apparently).
Wish you well. You are always in my heart and never far from my thoughts.
Fair winds and following seas!
(more pictures available in my Picasa album at: https://picasaweb.google.com/105075160125934020259/NorthboundDeliverySpring2012?authkey=Gv1sRgCJCWysm8xqz_HQ#)
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