Sweetest Thing
Anthony Richards
Sun 30 Nov 2008 19:24
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For those that look at the blog twice a day on
Sundays, this one is for you :-)
What is it like to do a watch?
Well you start by receiving the information from
the one ending his watch: what's on site: nothing, how the boat is doing:
behaving, how the wind and weather are doing: steady no change, and any
other useful info: you are on watch as of now.
Then you start looking, first you check the
information you received, this takes at lease 2 whole minutes, when you do it
sloooowly.
Then you look out for ships or... ufo, or dolphins
if no flying fish are around.
And then, you look for ships.
What do we see when we are looking for
ships?
A flat, today, blue ocean all around the
boat and on the horizon a light blue sky.
Like the capt'ain says, they, the ships, (ufos and
other stuff comes always from the same direction, that little corner of your
brain called imagination), so they might come from the south, or they
may come from the east, but then again some could come from the west, and surely
some sneaky ones sometimes come form the north.
So you "walk" your eyes by turning you head all the
way around to look for ships, or dolphins...
If you can't do this contortion, you can use the
rest of your body to turn your eyes, by keeping them in your head.
And then you get bowered of this so you start
looking for squalls, ha! this is more fun! will
we miss this one? or will it hit us?
The capt'ain says that the way to know is by
looking over the boat, directly over the mast, if you see a flying green pig, it
will hit us.
Or it might not hit us, as it happened yesterday,
on his watch, he saw a green pig flying directly over the mast,
and the squall did NOT hit us.
I think that he might be, either colour blind, or
that like me he just got his colours mixed up, it was a blue pig... or that is
was not directly over the mass...
What does a squall look like?
Like one of those nice big cumulus clouds, except
that is low in the horizon and BLACK. Not white.
Once you've went through one of these, your eyes
are very much on the look out for them.
It is not a pleasant thing at all, but like taking
cod liver oil or other "nice" things in life, the unpleasant effect is shortly
lived.
First the wind picks up, or first it dies down and
then it really picks up.
Then rain, heavy rain with
very heavy wind, and then after 10 or 15 minutes, or less it is all over,
and the boat is happy to have had a nice fresh water shower.
The way I see it is that the REAL dangers of
squalls is that while you are looking at it and watching for the
flying green pig to make sure that is directly over the mast, you might miss the
ship!
They move VERY fast.
Faster than the squalls or the pigs.
So this is how we do a day watch, we do this for 3
hours at a time.
At night it is much the same except that the pigs
can not be seen and you are dealing with stars that look like ships... it is an
other story.
PS Our capt'ain did not brag and he is not paying
me to write this in... he mentioned after our asking while calsualy talking over
one of his great diners, we are now waiting for an other moment of intimacy to
get the recipes.
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