Phone Calls and Compasses

Three whales, three five gallon buckets, and two distant ships seen on my
watch this afternoon. The Indian Ocean is flat, has the slightest, tiniest,
itsy-bit 'o green to it, but so far it's still a blue water we travel upon
with a pale turquoise when churned. That glows with bio-luminescence when
dark. Which looks like sparks through the binoculars (Hey! It's 45 feet
up- everything at sea looks like it glows at night). But the last moon I
saw was that thin crescent moon over Egypt, low on the horizon, buried in
the orange sunset- I'm watching and waiting for its return to my side of the
sky, though the stars will suffer for it.

The Three Sisters isn't as interesting through the binoculars as I thought
it might be, but the sword hilt on Orion's sword sure as hell is- what looks
like three stars is actually all kinds of stuff, including an entire
friggin' galaxy instead of that simple, center star, as it appears to my
naked eyeball. I am still pissed that google skymap is NOT on my phone
(I've installed it 3 times), and there isn't a star chart on this ship to be
found. I'm left making stuff up and that just isn't as useful when trying
to impress Laura with my encyclopedic knowledge of marginally useful stuff.
Seriously- the sword hilt is pretty damned cool. I had no idea. Go look at
it. Right now.

Still trying to get another phone card from the Captain so I can stay up
late and call Laura one night soon. We are exactly 12 hours apart right
now, which means I am literally on the other side of the world from her...
well, if I was at 47 degrees (and some change) south of the equator, but why
get absurdly technical when everything else on this ship is: 3 magnetic
compasses, 4 gyroscopic compass displays for 2 gyros, gps data on the 3
radars and the Ectus (I'm not sure how it's spelled) Chartplotter (which
reads the radars, AIS, and other vital speed, set, and drift information and
displays it as part of the chart data). A simple thing such as our heading
is broken down like this: "We are traveling at zero-five zero (gyro
heading) for zero-five-one (Course to True North) checking zero-four-nine
(magnetic compass minus variation and deviation information to make True)."


These numbers are updated on a whiteboard by yours truly as they change, and
I wondered why, until one of the AB's shared his story of being on the
bridge of the Kuai when it was hit by a massive Pacific Ocean wave just one
day off the Washington coast. The Kuai had a house on the forward part of
the ship, right up at the front. Until a "hundred and fifty foot" wave
smashed her face in, pushing the house 12 inches backward, and twisting it.
The inch-and-a-half glass of the 150 foot high wheelhouse was shattered, the
bridge was flooded, and all the electronics were fried- including the
steering and gyro compasses. The magnetic's overhead binnacle was wiped off
the wheelhouse entirely.

The ship turned sideways to the waves (bad) and started to snap-roll (very
bad). The AB telling the story was sloshing from side to side across the
entire bridge deck in a soup of salt water and debris, until a mate came up
the stairs and opened the door to the wheelhouse and was washed down 5
flights of stairs, to his detriment. The wheelhouse was drained of standing
water, however, to the benefit of everyone else. The only steering left was
the NFU (non-follow-up), a paddle that doesn't automatically return the helm
to mid-ships. The only compass was a small, hand-held magnetic compass the
captain had in his quarters. The only clue they had about where they were
and where they needed to go? That damned whiteboard I am constantly
updating.

And I just want to call Laura... why in the hell should that be so
complicated!?

Well, they got the ship in by manually driving her back into the Strait of
Juan de Fuca using the NFU gear, that hand-held magnetic compass, the
variation off the chart and the deviation from the tables, and the ship was
scrapped once it was all said and done. That is almost the end of the
story.

They had no radio. A ship with no communications, totally unlit, not
answering USCG (Coast Guard) hailings... well, the military took over,
viewing it as a potential hostile force, and was deemed a target and given a
count-down all her own. A deckhand below, by some cosmic twist of fortune,
found one of the handheld vhf's in his room and reached someone on shore in
Port Angeles who acted as an intermediary to the Coast Guard and the rest is
history. Two deckhands on this ship were on that one, BTW. True story.