Merry Christmas

The waxing gibbous moon lit 4-6 meter confused seas like a silver road
during my midnight to 0400 watch on Christmas Eve, as bands of rain washed
over us, pushed right into our teeth by a 40 knot westerly. Orion, Canlis
Major, and Taurus peaked out from between the waves of silver-lined clouds
and showers.

Having just learned the term "crepuscular rays," (the shafts of light that
come down through clouds from a sun nearing the horizon, sometimes called
"Backstays to the Sun") I am now confounded by what to call their lunar
equivalent, because I saw several instances where shafts of moonlight came
down through the clouds last night, and "lunar crepuscular rays" is too
cumbersome. Bowditch had nothing for me, but I did learn about lunar and
solar pillars (rays that go both up and down from the moon or sun)... I'm on
the lookout now to see them. I will create a term as soon as I have Google
again and can explore the components and origins of the word "crepuscular,"
because "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," and all
that... I'd like the term to be a nicely balanced counterpoint to its solar
equivalent that is based on the same roots.

I spent Christmas Eve day (my overtime shift) swinging and prying on the
lashing rod turnbuckles and stopper nuts with the stick of rebar that
Egyptians, Sri Lankans, and Singaporeans call a "spanner," but what I have
recently named a "wonder-bar," pronounced "voonderbar," which means
"wonderful" in German. It's the least I can do to gussy-up the caveman-like
task of climbing up and down grease-covered lashing bridges and beating on
crap for a dollar. In the rain, of course... North Atlantic in the winter
and all that... let's not make it more glamorous than it needs to be.

And for my evening overtime shift of Christmas Eve and morning overtime
shift Christmas Day we replaced the cables that raise and lower the
gangways. Picture this- 3 people wrestling several hundred feet of steel
cable in a somewhat confined area, with buckets of grease, grabbing handfuls
of it and slathering every inch of the cable as it's slowly spooled up... in
the rain of course. I kept picturing a county fair somewhere in the
heartland of America and a lone, freaked-out piglet in a corral being chased
by 8 year-olds in bib-overalls.

For my Christmas Day watch the seas ranged from gunmetal to US Navy
Destroyer grey, the water was the color of the igneous rock, chert (a cheap
cousin to flint), which churned a dirty moss green that was identical in hue
to the unchurned water. A blanket of cumulous clouds at 500 feet kept the
cold in, and about half-way through watch the gentle following wind began to
build and swing around to our starboard side (out of the north) into what
will be a high wind problem for me as I steer the ship into NYC early
tomorrow morning. All I need is a serious current and a lot of traffic to
make my job a little bit challenging. If the pilot has an Egyptian accent I
will be in pure nirvana.

And I have been pondering a mathematical puzzle: I have noted on many
occasions that when my boat has all the water in the world around it and
just one other boat shows up, it is usually on a course that brings it close
enough to be a problem for me. If I apply that principle to 18 nm (approx.
visibility to the horizon on this ship), we're talking about an area of 1020
nm. Obviously the odds are less than 1 in 1020 for a CPA (closest point of
approach) of 1 mile... what is the factor that applies to the 1/1020 odds
that makes it mathematically correct? I have hypothesized the number of
directions of common courses divided by 360 possible degrees, which is a
factor of .005 for a main course that runs in 2 directions, that gives me a
1 in 5 chance of collision. That jibes with reality as I know it, but a
mathematician is needed to tell me how absurd my 14th 15-hour-day-in a-row
logic is, or is not.

OK. Merry Christmas. I'm going to get as much sleep as possible- it's
going to be a looooong morning of driving and docking and craning and all
the things ships do in port.