Sunday 6 June 2010

Picton Castle at sea; Sunday 6 June 2010 בס"ד

Morning watch was pretty cool tonight. Besides cleaning the galley and studying for the derby, I spotted two ships before the lookout did and two more ships while standing fourth lookout. I think Rebecca is noting my lookout abilities, which I'm proud of, and she said maybe I'll get to so some heavy duty coastal lookout stuff at some point, which would be awesome. I feel like I'm really good at lookout because A) when I was a lifeguard in WLE I took it quite seriously and never took my eyes off the water, so I'm okay with keeping a constant eye and not getting bored, and B) nerdy as it might sound, it's a lot like my favorite game of all time, the Silent Hunter sub simulators, and when I spot these ships in real life now I'm planning a trajectory for how to approach and sink them with torpedoes. I know it sounds nerdy, but I love those games and I love lookout and I love being at sea.

Today, being Sunday, had no ship work, although I did mop up the aft superstructure head, which takes in water from the scullery sinks draining. The seamanship derby began at 1500, and started with intro skits by watches and a fair amount of bribing the judges (I contributed some rum). We then had a pinrail race, where the mates name something and the first person to touch it scores, a line coiling time trial where we had to coil all the thrown down lines as quickly and neatly as possible, a knot-tying event, a compass-boxing event, and a bucket race where we filed buckets up with seawater and emptied them into a tote. It was good fun, and we then ended with a welcome power shower. Afterwards, the Captain told us about Panama and the canal transit. We had dinner made by crew, which had some excellent sushi from a fish caught earlier in the day. I worked out with Jo and started with some new people, and Zachman gave me his own version of the rose. I read some more, and now ready to go to sleep for a bit. Night watch will start twenty minutes later and end twenty minutes later after our four hours is up since we're retarding the time by one hour for time zone change.