Making Way Again At Last.

We are finally underway, making way, since we first started drifting 13 days ago.  

It's hard to shake off mental fog and awaken from the fugue state induced by going nowhere when each day is a repeat of the one before. The rumble of the engine making 14 knots at 78 RPM helps do exactly that. We'll take on a pilot and anchor in Puget Sound in just a few days.

Interestingly, we’ll drop anchor in the anchorage I transit through when I run to my boathouse in Port Orchard from Ballard. It's named "Yukon Anchorage" and I've never heard it referred to by that name, nor does the internet know it as such... But that's what it's called on the Admiralty charts in the ship's ECDIS (chartplotter).

I’ve used my Peter Harrison’s seabird identification guide – a new edition – to easily identify two different albatross I've seen in recent days - a waved albatross and a black-footed albatross. Oddly enough, the two birds appear on the same page.

The new guide is so much better than the older one I used to carry (which relied on photographs, not Peter's artwork). It's a wonder I could identify anything accurately!  

And I've seen a blackfish known as a "false killer whale" and at least three pods, 50-strong, of striped dolphin. The dolphin always make a beeline for the ship when they see us, I think because they love to play in the wave that forms around the bulbous bow.

They're probably horribly disappointed when they discover this ship doesn't have a bulbous bow.  It's the only ship I've ever seen without one, actually, and I wonder exactly why the designers omitted the efficiency and performance-enhancing structure from this boat.  

Now, we steam north toward Tacoma, where I hope to quickly say hello/goodbye to any and all my peeps available and grab some extra warmth-making items in preparation for the extreme cold of Korea.

My brother flies to Incheon regularly, so I hope to run into him while I'm there. I know that sounds weirdly casual, but it's actually more likely than any non-transportation-worker might expect.

Since we began heading north this morning, the swells have built considerably. They're massive, slow-rolling things that are hard to measure; after 4 hours of watching them on my first watch of the day, my best estimate is 6-7 meters from NNE with a 12-15 second period. The wind waves are minimal. It looks almost flat but feels anything but.

Bowditch (background here) says most mariners underestimate the height of seas, and the ship's log agrees with that - the swells were reported as only 3 meters.  

I visualize the geometry of peak and trough, then throw mental high-boy containers in that simplified triangle as my method of estimating seas. One high boy is roughly 3 meters high.

To be fair to my watch partners, unless you're staring at the ocean without distraction for several minutes, you might not even see the swells, especially when there are no wind waves.

They're focused on updating and upgrading firefighting equipment, prepping for cargo, new crew turnover, etc., and aren't staring at the sea with the same patience nor degree of leisure as me.

In these conditions, the ship pitches with a seven-second free-fall drop that gives way to a significant increase in weight as we climb out of the trough.  

It's amusing watching sailors on the stairs as they race up as much of a flight as they can during the drop, and then suddenly stop to wait out carrying the extra pounds they've acquired when climbing out of the valley.

Anyway... I’m supposed to be skipping dinner and sleeping so that I get enough rest, not writing this blog post on my phone... so with that, I dive back into the flatline of the routine and reenter the dream I was having before I woke up long enough to put this into words.

Onwards.  I'll see y'all in Tacoma.

Hove-to, Holidaze, UFOs Past and Present

5 days.  It's only been 5 days.

We left that little port outside of San Diego 6 days ago and steamed west for 300 miles, then turned the ignition to "off" and started drifting to wherever the waves and winds dictate.

To a watchstanders such as myself, however, that means it's been 10 sleeps, not 5 days.  

Time slows down.  The circadian rhythm gets tossed out the window.  I have my short sleep in the afternoon, and my long sleep in the morning like a crepuscular animal whose life-cycle follows a semi-diernal tide.

I saw a large pod of spinner dolphin on the way out to the waters where we're now drifting. They made directly for the bow of the ship where, if the past is any indicator, they played in the bow waves but were completely out of sight from my lofty seat up on the bridge.  

I did not see their departure.

The green glow lit the waves during the transit out here, too, and the white horses were clearly visible in the long eyes all the way to the horizon in the impenetrable night.

I watched the international space station pass overhead, from right to left, and then I saw other lights in the sky that didn't make any sense.

I watched them manoeuver in weird circles, then disappear for awhile before reappearing nearby.  They were amber in color.  They were far away.  They were fast.

I finally pointed them out to my watch partner.

We heard one side of a radio communication where a shoreside facility was asking another vessel if they saw any signaling lights, that they were getting reports of flares reported in that area, but because that vessel was too far away we never heard their response.

But I've seen flares on numerous occasions, and those were not flares.

I didn't see them again until last night, 5 nights into our drift.  The deck cadet was up on the bridge bored and lamenting missing out on celebrating New Year's Eve but the light show was brief.  I had just managed to dial in my binoculars from where the previous watch had ganked with the eyepieces before they disappeared, not to return.

Again- not flares.  Not even close.

We've been drifting for 5 days.  Only 5 days.  

We have 14 more to go... 28 sleeps until Tacoma.

I told my watch partner about a 4x8 watch I stood with the Chief Mate on the APL President Polk in 2013, when we saw an unidentified and unexplainable light we presumed at first to be Venus rising and then the ISS in flight.  We were in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, 1000 miles from the nearest land.  We were pretty sure it was either extremely high altitude or suborbital.

Then, this object performed a smooth, 90-degree port turn and went behind a cloud, something no satellite, weather balloon, or space station could do.

That CM refused to acknowledge what we'd both just seen. One minute we were puzzling through what it might be, then it defied physics; the next minute, the CM was gaslighting himself about what we saw and refused to talk about it.

I persisted the remainder of that voyage to get him to admit what we saw, but without success. I'm convinced that's why he started playing Pentecostal "rock" on watch every morning after that, much to my horror and chagrin.  

28 sleeps.  

The weather has been flat, warm, and mostly sunny, but that's about to change for the worse.  A north wind is coming and with it will come the ocean swells, wind waves, rain, cold, and an end to the calm, flat conditions.

Our mild drift southward will become more pronounced.  Rest will suffer.  Work will become even moreso.  

The only thing that will be the same will be the slow passing of the next 28 sleeps, and I am about to enjoy one of those right now, so on watch tonight, when I'm looking for the lights in the sky, I will be saying to myself "27 sleeps..."