Saturday 20 November 2010

Picton Castle at sea; Saturday 20 November 2010 בס"ד

Woke up at 0330 and everybody showed up except Nadja, so we figured we were being tested to see if we could assign ourselves to duties. We did and it went well, but still no Nadja. It turns out that she didn't get a proper wakeup and was still sleeping, and it was not a test, but it took us a few minutes to figure this out. I precomputed the morning twilight stars, and stood second helm steering NW1/2W. Yo was our “navigator,” which meant that she'd fill out all the hour logs instead of the helmsman and also plot our position and determine our Course Made Good True, log, etc. After helm, I shot stars with Bracken's nice sextant, which is way easier on my eyes than the cheapo plastic practice ones. Deckwash, and fourth lookout because our original fourth lookout felt ill and went below. I reported lots of trash floating in the water, amidst which I saw schools of fish and dolphins playing. Sad. Watch below, and I reported to the Bosun department to lay in with some work. A marlinspike was scheduled for tomorrow and it's theme would be 90's high school dance, so I asked Sophie to the dance. She said yes, and then told me to scrape excess roofing cement from the maintop floorboards with a turpentine rag and a putty knife. From aloft, I could see literally endless fields of floating and semi-submerged trash, and there is really not a more poignant way to emphasize how terrible ordinary littering and pollution is until you see the dolphins swimming in it, unable to choose a different, cleaner area of sea. It was a shame, and I'm definitely not one of those Greenpeace “save the planet” types of people. I finished removing the spooge before lunch, helped clean up the paint locker, and then had lunch. After, I repaired my hat and made a new lanyard for my spike. At 1500 we hosted a volunteer workshop for DB about planes. My part of the workshop was teaching him about airport security. It was a pretty funny workshop that taught DB how he'll be molested, arrested, and/or get laid if he did anything other than shut his mouth the entire time he was aboard. Mustered for watch, and as first lookout I reported only a very large piece of floating trash that might have been a refigerator or small boat. We set fore-and-aft sails, and I was the assigned naviagator for watch so I filled out the log and plotted our position every hour. We caught a Mahi, and I bagged it and put it in the freezer. Wiped down soot from the quarterdeck, had dinner, did galley clean, filled ingredients buckets, ground coffee, and watch below. Jan found a joke book and so he and the forepeak looked for good and bad jokes. Then bed.