Day 10
Oh Lady of rare earth, Muse of Technology,
skipping through the ether on slender feet of silicone
and binding the world together with ribbons of information,
we bow our heads to and over you.
Send my song across the water to devices in friendly hands.
Let not errant fingers find their way to Delete buttons
nor an unsuspecting Exit wipe out hours of work.
Aid Leona’s passage by finding fairest winds and clearest course.
Lift our hearts with music and series streamed from far.
Brightest, quickest, youngest of the Sisters, loose not your mischief on gentle Leona,
but show the world your brilliance and beneficence.
We do have a wealth of technological marvels aboard Leona: radar, AIS, solar panels and the newest addition, Starlink. Like the Vikings, Elon Musk may not be a taste for all palates, but his satellite space-necklace is a game-changer. The fact that I am able to create a website 1500 miles in the middle of the ocean is nothing short of miraculous. Well, to be fair, the fact that I am able to create a website anywhere at all is nothing short of miraculous. So it’s to be expected that glitches would occur. Like the glitch that wiped out a chunk of yesterday’s musings. I think I have corrected it, but forgive me if it reads slightly differently from earlier this morning.
Looking back from the bow, David caught a moment of Leona’s wave-dancing
As I gaze out at the horizon, at this ever-shifting yet essentially featureless expanse of blues and steels and silvers (as Georgie and I find ourselves doing at regular intervals), I cannot help but wonder at the fact that we WILL find our way to a tiny island 3000 miles from where we started. But then we do have all sorts of computerized charts to aid us: Navionics, Predict Wind, Raymarine, Garmin…
David’s favorite is Predict Wind. “It aggregates data from six different GRIB files from several different sources around the world, looking at the same point on Earth. I hate to say it, but using a model, essentially AI, it will plot the most efficient sailing path between two points, taking into consideration “polars” like wind, waves, currents, and boat size.”
David did cut his business teeth in the tech world, after all.
And should our Muse get cheeky, we have cruising books written by experienced sailors and of course the good old-fashioned British Admiralty charts. These do roughly the same thing as Predict Wind and use historical data to create wind and current charts for specific months. We have the one for May.
The fact that the Polynesian Voyagers were able to traverse this expanse in timber, coconut fibre and tortoiseshell canoes using only the stars is humbling. As loudly as I sing “I am Moana!” we are still navigational snowflakes.
British Admiralty Charts
As technologically savvy as Leona may be, chronographically we are challenged. We try to set our clocks according to longitude, latitude, Greenwich Mean Time and the International Date Line, but then, what does it really matter? We eat when we’re hungry, we sleep when we are tired as long as someone is on watch (preferably not me as we’d all like to get to the Marquesas sometime this month), and we run our days on PLT: Pacific Leona Time.
OK, that’s more romantic than accurate. We do use time extremely carefully to calculate our speed and mileage (another 194 miles in the past 24 hours). Most importantly, our night watches are on a strict three-hour rotation: Georgie and I from 9pm-midnight, Jeff from midnight-3am, and David from 3am-6am.
Watches with Georgie have fallen into a bit of a pattern. After Jeff and David disappear for their first sleep, we make our cocoa and settle in for some small screen entertainment, Kindle or Netflix. The weather has been too cloudy to make sitting outside much fun, so we have been staying indoors in the dark and monitoring all the important details from the pilot’s desk. Usually one of us falls asleep, but we try to take it in turns.
At 11:45pm sharp, I put on the little green kettle that Jeff suggested (insisted?) David add to the galley set-up, put a teaspoon of instant coffee in the mug, find the UHF milk, and mix the whole thing up. I break out a chunk of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Chocolate and wait eagerly for Jeff to appear so I can crawl into my little cocoon for the next six hours. Hearing the rush of water against Leona’s hull, I rest easy knowing Leona is in safe hands.
Billy Booby, AKA “the Crapper” came for the evening
And finally, for the birders among you eagerly awaiting the avian updates, our fellow traveller was indeed a Brown Booby. Billy Booby, or “the Crapper” as Jeff christened him, did spend the night on our roof, even bringing a date for the evening.
Now we are hoping for a good squall to wash away their souvenirs.