Sea Trials by Peter Bourke

Author:Peter Bourke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw Hill LLC
Published: 2014-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

DAY 19

WATCHING THE RADIO

That fat speed that I love, that sensation, that’s what I want.

—PICABO STREET

The wind has gone light again, and we’re on the verge of being becalmed but still moseying along in the right direction. Why doesn’t this get boring? The great sailor and writer Bernard Moitessier once wrote, “I hate storms, but calms undermine my spirits.” Ain’t that the truth. But of course, as Moitessier knew, between those two ends of the spectrum lies the vast joy of sailing. When you’re not scared or going crazy, life on a sailboat can be sublime.

Stocks of corned beef hash (canned of course), eggs, and coffee still fill one of the lockers and cooking is easy as we sidle along. The sea has lost her whitecaps, and she’s dressed this morning in one of her dark blue suits. The sun is drying and warming the cockpit. It is a grand day for dining, and I stretch out the meal as long as conscionable while considering the day’s priorities beyond staying on track for the finish.

I am fortunate that my little fire in the wiring a few days ago did not affect the GPS feed to the VHF radio, and so the unit still displays my current position. A nice feature, and very handy when I’m making notations in the log, plotting my position on the chart, or just want to know where I am. The radio shows our position to three decimal places, and it doesn’t take long for the number located three places out from the decimal to change. That’s the one showing changes of one thousandth of a nautical mile, and it’s the hook. I’ve found myself staring at the changing thousandths of a minute in the longitude and latitude boxes for long periods, munching on pretzels or an apple and watching the digits tick by.

A minute of longitude is an arc equal to one sixtieth of a degree, a tiny segment of the 360 degrees of arc circling our planet. A minute of longitude, east or west, varies as the meridians of longitude converge at the poles, but one minute of the arc of latitude, north or south along any meridian of longitude, is the definition of a nautical mile, and it’s a constant, or it would be if the earth were a perfect sphere. It is close enough to a constant that the agreement to peg it to exactly 1,852 meters, reached in 1929 at the International Hydrographic Conference, still holds. In any event, if both these numbers are increasing at roughly the same rate I know we are headed northwest, and if the latitude number is increasing and the longitude number dropping, then I know that we have somehow gotten ourselves turned around and are headed back to Plymouth. If one number is changing faster than another, the direction can be fine-tuned, from, say, northwest to west-northwest.

With this new awareness in mind, I can spend a minute staring at the numbers, their direction of change and their rate of change, and get a sense of our heading.

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