the moon
Panatlantic
Thu 3 Jan 2008 19:38
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Dear all,
I trust this finds you well, one day after
officially Britain's most depressed day! (Jan 2nd, for those using the coptic
calendar and aren't sure.)
I hope you are all sticking to your New Year's
resolutions; my one and only resolution is to row less. I appreciate that this
isn't going to be possible for the next 3-4 weeks or so, but after that i will
be highly disciplined in sticking to it! Those of you who catch me rowing have
my permission to call me Susan, and slap my face with a hallibut.
James and i have been able to crack on these past
couple of days as the winds and waves have picked up considerably, to the
detriment of our physical state unfortunately! Every time we hear the winds are
coming we whoop for joy, then wince in the knowledge that it means all those
salt sores will reopen again! James has our current speed record, 13.6kts down
the face of a behemoth of a wave that entirely engulfed the boat. It's quite a
sight seeing something of that size coming, it looms upon you very suddenly as
you drop off the back of the previous wave and is always greeted with a quick
exclamation of "gosh!" or somesuch! You realise that it is going to break
moments after confirming your suspicions that the face of the wave is indeed
nigh on vertical, and then the white horses descend upon you and you're away!
Each time this happens you get a thorough drenching of course, but it's the one
time when i don't object to having a wave come over me, it is all rather
exciting!
These huge seas also create other problems too:
eating a main meal becomes very difficult as you have to keep your foot on the
steering at all times; filling our water bottles is dangerous and a chore; but
most pertinently, going to the toilet is now a life-or-death matter! Trying to
balance on the bucket while keeping the stern into these oncoming monsters is
fraught with danger! Yesterday i valiantly held on through my own shift so that
i could 'make toilet' while James rowed. So i handed over to 'captain Burge' and
confidently took to the throne. Within seconds James had managed to steer us
onto the beam, and low and behold a wave broke directly over the side and over
me. Whoopie! I cursed at James, who defended himself saying that he was steering
perfectly at 270 degrees (our general westerly bearing). I had to point out that
it matters not where he is pointing, what matters is what direction the waves
are coming!
I wrote briefly about human automata and my
preempting of the nightly alarm, well James has provided us with a few gems that
i shall regale you with here!
As his afternoon sleep neared its end (we
sleep for 1 session in the afternoon each), i prepared to give James the usual
"5 minutes to go mate" shout, but changed my mind at the last minute and, in a
comedy high-pitched voice, yelled "cockadoodledo!" instead. James stirred, then
his eyes opened in panic, he stared at me horrified for a second, looked all
around him and then passed out again. 30 seconds later, after i'd stopped
laughing i repeated the call: "cockadoodledo!" and once again James started up
in surprise. His face was the opitomy of confusion and one i won't forget. He
still doesn't know what i did!
A couple of nights ago i saw James turn on the
cabin light for his 1am shift, he groaned and stretched and reached out for the
talc bottle, but in his slumber he accidentally grabbed the pee jug
instead....Assuming the position he began to shake little droplets of pee all
over his backside, before the realisation of what he was doing struck him!!
Yesterday morning at 08:40 (just before dawn, we're
still using GMT though we're a long way west) James opened the cabin door and
started to climb out.
"Without looking at your watch, tell me what time
it is" I said.
"i dunno, about 10 past?"
Not only was this wildly wrong, but i have no idea
what his brain was doing telling him that 10 past was an appropriate time to be
getting up and coming outside! This just shows what a disrupted state our poor
simple minds are in out here, especially at night.
I have been admiring the moon as it wanes recently,
but then the thought struck me: The shadow we are casting on the moon is not
that of a 'bite', ie the moon wasn't becoming an incrementally smaller crescent.
I pondered for a while: how on earth can a sperical body, the earth, cast a
shadow that to all intents and purposes appears to be the opposite of what it
should be?
I posed this conundrum to James, who said that he'd
been thinking exactly the same thing.
2 days later i suggested to James that it might be
to do with the way light bends around the curviture of the earth, to which he
said he'd been thinking exactly the same thing.
Someone out there will know, this has been
perplexing me now for a few days, am i missing something incredibly simple?
Or is the answer a little more complicated than that. Answers on a postcard to
Komale
Small rowing boat
Atlantic Ocean
Or just reply to this email.
Thanks!
Right, on that note i must leave thee. Night
beckons, i'm going to take my camera out with me again to try and photograph the
2 remaining 'about to fall asleep at the oars' faces that i've yet to capture!
I've so far managed to photograph the '1000 yard empty stare' and the 'thousand
yard empty stare with one eye'! Next are the 'grimace' (god knows what it looks
like, but it feels very funny!) and the 'gollum', which by the way it feels will
strike fear into the hearts of even the stoutest of you readers!
Until Saturday good people,
Niall out
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