Starry Night

MFT: Missing the squalls and a gorgeous sky
LFP: Memorizing all the information

Hallo, so yesterday we were at sea still sailing on our way to the Marquesas. We had a lot of things to learn/memorize for today. But the cool thing is now I can do dead reckoning and know how to plot our position on a chart independent of GPS! One of the things we learned the first week was how to read a GPS location and use that to plot our location on the chart. But this week we have been expanding our knowledge and learning how to plot sans GPS usage. We ask the helmsman for the course steered (what course they are steering according to the large compass in front of them). Then we can back out from that magnetic direction and true direction. Using that value we can plot given previous locations on the chart our current location and calculate the Lat & Long for our current location. We are even starting to learn celestial navigation (using a sextant to get lat & long from stars). However, I have not learned that yet (maybe tonight on watch?).

The students all have to complete a safety checklist by Wednesday Feb. 12th before we are allowed to climb the rigging. I am also expected to do the same. I waited until most of the students had completed theirs so I wouldn’t be taking up their time to get graded. I then managed to hammer out all 8 verbal tests on watch while I was at the helm with my mate on duty, Dan Stone. He was nice and quizzed me and then checked me off. Honestly by far and away the best part of yesterday was our evening watch. It was absolutely gorgeous outside. We missed the squall (it bypassed us without raining, woohoo) and then the skies cleared up. The moon is mostly full but we can still see quite a lot of stars. I got out my green laser pointer and used that to ask crew members for the names of the various stars/constellations visible. I finally got to find the southern cross!


It was a pretty busy night but lots of fun especially on lookout duty. It’s nice to be out on the bowsprit when you can see things easily (aka a mostly full moon) and its not raining. Biggest mistake was not bringing sheet music. Its fun to sing while on lookout but I can’t seem to remember most of my songs and we don’t have internet to look up the lyrics! Also you are only allowed to listen to music in your bunk. Some of the crew and students did bring musical instruments (ukeles ect) and periodically they will play on deck which is lots of fun. Anyways, mostly yesterday was business as usual. We had watch and good weather (kind of sunny). There was plenty of work to do around the boat. All in all a nice day.

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