UPDATE: Tuesday, October 9th, 2012
Day #11 of passage from Vanuatu to Marshall Islands LTY time: 17:35 (Marshall Islands time = UTC +12)
Location: about 100nm SSE of Majuro
Position: 03 20.232 N, 171 54.542 E (you can cut & past this into Google Earth to see on map)
SOG: 7.6 kts (motor sailing) (SOG = Speed over Ground)
COG: 348 degrees (COG = Course over Ground)
Wind: 12kts SE
Seas/Swell: 1m @ 6 seconds ESE
Weather: Completely overcast and rainy
Air temp: 89 F 31C
Sea temp: 96 F 36 C
Barometer: 1017nm LIVING INSIDE a COSMIC ACCORDION One of the things I enjoy the most about this life is how it is so filled with contrasts. I’ve been reminded of that in the past 24 hours as that’s what the sailing and the weather have been like. I left you last night just as the sun was setting and I had successfully reeled in that perfect sized (for me) tuna. He was about 50cm/18 inches long and yielded six very good sized meals for me, one of which I had last night and was DELICIOUS! The night sail that followed was a calm and as peaceful as can be. Not as much wind as I’d like, down around 10 knots or so, but enough to keep me moving along at about 5 knots most of the time on very smooth waters and gentle swell out of the SE. The moon rises of late have been quite spectacular as the dark amber moon beams play hide and seek through the tangle of low scattered clouds on the horizon. Last night’s sky had very large clear black expanses interspersed between equally large patches of cloud. The clear spots were so dense with stars it was as if they had all rushed over from their usual locations in order to shine through for me and were shining exceptionally brightly to compete with the brilliant moonbeams which were dancing across the water illuminating a path upon the seas straight to Learnativity and I. I enjoyed this spectacle throughout the night’s sails and watched the transformation as the clear spaces shrank with each passing hour until by first light the whole sky was filled in and there were ominous mushroom shaped storm clouds rising from every point of the compass of the endless horizons surrounding me. With so many storms in all directions the winds were constantly changing and I soon had to abandon sailing and motor in order to maintain headway. For the first few hours I was able to strategically steer a course to weave my way through the slots between adjacent cells but by mid-morning the even these spaces closed in and we were engulfed within a very large line of storms. Mid-afternoon I had passed through the storm front and emerged into what feels like a large dome of overcast skies with fairly constant drizzle and relatively high seas which continue to be the conditions as I type this out. What I was struck by in the past 24 hours as I’ve gone through all these transitions is the mind boggling range of scope and scale of the world I’m a part of. Last night I experienced the infinitely large end of the scale it was so clear and dark and you couldn’t tell where the star filled sky stopped and the star reflecting seas began, and where it felt like there was no bottom to that inky black ocean below and felt like I was looking out into infinity as I gazed up at the galaxies and stars filling the jet black skies above. Yet this afternoon when the storms closed in and the combination of dark super saturated clouds and torrential rains reduced my whole visible world shrank to the size of a small circle just a few feet from the edge of the boat. Then I would sail out into an open patch and my world would now zoom back up to infinitely large only to shrink back down to almost nothing within minutes of the next storm coming through. With all these dramatic expansions and contractions in scope and scale happening within minutes and being repeated several times in a single 24 hour day I felt like I was living inside on some kind of cosmic accordion. And as my world conflated to be even more liquid than ever with the combination of humidity, wet clouds, downpours and the ocean surrounding me I am also struck by my growing profundity of cosmic facts such as how are more molecules in a glass full of water than there are stars in the cosmos and yet at the same time 99.999% of all that water and other mass is made up of the “nothing” of seemingly empty space between each electron, proton and neutron. So my day has been spent being entertained and awed by the experiential music of this cosmic accordion symphony that has been playing in the concert hall created between the infinitesimally small and the infinitely huge. I hope that with examples like this you can understand why I refer to my life as one of constant AWE: Adventure, Wonder and Excitement. This experience also provided me with more examples of what I commented on in a previous post about how our incredible brains create what I think can best be described as the most incredible simulation of what we understand to be the world around us. Our eyeballs are but one relatively small source of the input which feeds this simulation and we don’t see with our eyes so much as we do with our mind’s eye. One example of this in my case is the way I use Radar to help me construct the simulated model in my head of the world around me. You may be familiar with this from the sources you consult on the web or newspapers or nightly weather TV reports when you look at the Radar and satellite views of the world around you. In my case I have Radar on the boat and in addition to the more obvious use (to many) for seeing other ships in the area, I actually use the Radar more often as a way to “see” the weather around me. As my four kilowatt radome scans a much larger circle than I can see, especially when my world gets small in the midst of a storm, it shows me the shape, size, location and movement of each of the storm cells. This is all presented to me as if I am floating a mile or two up in the air looking down with Learnativity at the center of this sweeping circle and when I feed this into my mental model of my world at that moment I am able to “see” this much more extensive 3D space I’m sailing in. Today was also filled with lots more learning as I figured out the trajectory of each of these storm cells by factoring in such things as the vectors of my speed and direction with that of the storm cell and then add to this the circular rotation of the winds which surround each storm cell using all this to chart out my trajectory through them and know which direction the wind was going to be coming from at any given point as it swirls around me. Since crossing the equator I had to do a mental flip as well that reminded me of how I have to invert my thinking when I’m driving a car in a country that drives on the opposite side of the road from the last one you left. With the many different countries which have colonized the different countries here in the South Pacific the side of the road you drive on often changes from one to the next so Fiji was on the right hand side having been British and Vanuatu was on the left having been French. In my case today I had to switch my thinking to remember that winds rotate clockwise around these storm cells now that I’m in the Northern hemisphere and this enables me to know which direction the winds will clock around me as I sail through a storm cell. Wind direction is rather critical information for a sailboat and sailor as you might imagine! ;) OK, class, that’s your classes for today, you’re free to go now! I’m happy to report that as I look up ahead here just before sunset I can see the vertical bands of clouds breaking up to the north so hopefully first light tomorrow will show have me sailing into the day accompanied by the rapidly expanding phase of the cosmic accordion. My instruments also tell me that I am now about eighty eight nautical smiles from the outer east end of Majuro atoll and so as long as I can maintain the good speeds of late I should be able to make it to the mooring field in good light tomorrow afternoon. If you happen to check on a map or satellite photos of this area you will see that the Majuro atoll is a large east/west stretching elliptical coral atoll with just one pass in located a bit west of the middle of the northern coast. Even though I am only 88nm away from the outer eastern tip of Majuro atoll and that will put me within a nautical mile or so of the mooring field which is just off the capital city of Majuro, I have to get INSIDE the atoll first. The only pass into the atoll is located a bit west of the midpoint of the northern coast so I have to make a large U turn up around the outer east end of the atoll, along the northern coast, through the pass and back inside east end and pick up a mooring ball. This U turn is almost 25 nautical miles which will take me over four hours to traverse so I need to keep my speed up in order to cover the total distance and be able to safely navigate my way to the mooring ball before the light fades too much. The end of a passage is usually a bit busy with checking in and other duties but I’ll at least send out a short note to let you know when Learnativity is safely tied up to our new home base for a few months.
Day #11 of passage from Vanuatu to Marshall Islands LTY time: 17:35 (Marshall Islands time = UTC +12)
Location: about 100nm SSE of Majuro
Position: 03 20.232 N, 171 54.542 E (you can cut & past this into Google Earth to see on map)
SOG: 7.6 kts (motor sailing) (SOG = Speed over Ground)
COG: 348 degrees (COG = Course over Ground)
Wind: 12kts SE
Seas/Swell: 1m @ 6 seconds ESE
Weather: Completely overcast and rainy
Air temp: 89 F 31C
Sea temp: 96 F 36 C
Barometer: 1017nm LIVING INSIDE a COSMIC ACCORDION One of the things I enjoy the most about this life is how it is so filled with contrasts. I’ve been reminded of that in the past 24 hours as that’s what the sailing and the weather have been like. I left you last night just as the sun was setting and I had successfully reeled in that perfect sized (for me) tuna. He was about 50cm/18 inches long and yielded six very good sized meals for me, one of which I had last night and was DELICIOUS! The night sail that followed was a calm and as peaceful as can be. Not as much wind as I’d like, down around 10 knots or so, but enough to keep me moving along at about 5 knots most of the time on very smooth waters and gentle swell out of the SE. The moon rises of late have been quite spectacular as the dark amber moon beams play hide and seek through the tangle of low scattered clouds on the horizon. Last night’s sky had very large clear black expanses interspersed between equally large patches of cloud. The clear spots were so dense with stars it was as if they had all rushed over from their usual locations in order to shine through for me and were shining exceptionally brightly to compete with the brilliant moonbeams which were dancing across the water illuminating a path upon the seas straight to Learnativity and I. I enjoyed this spectacle throughout the night’s sails and watched the transformation as the clear spaces shrank with each passing hour until by first light the whole sky was filled in and there were ominous mushroom shaped storm clouds rising from every point of the compass of the endless horizons surrounding me. With so many storms in all directions the winds were constantly changing and I soon had to abandon sailing and motor in order to maintain headway. For the first few hours I was able to strategically steer a course to weave my way through the slots between adjacent cells but by mid-morning the even these spaces closed in and we were engulfed within a very large line of storms. Mid-afternoon I had passed through the storm front and emerged into what feels like a large dome of overcast skies with fairly constant drizzle and relatively high seas which continue to be the conditions as I type this out. What I was struck by in the past 24 hours as I’ve gone through all these transitions is the mind boggling range of scope and scale of the world I’m a part of. Last night I experienced the infinitely large end of the scale it was so clear and dark and you couldn’t tell where the star filled sky stopped and the star reflecting seas began, and where it felt like there was no bottom to that inky black ocean below and felt like I was looking out into infinity as I gazed up at the galaxies and stars filling the jet black skies above. Yet this afternoon when the storms closed in and the combination of dark super saturated clouds and torrential rains reduced my whole visible world shrank to the size of a small circle just a few feet from the edge of the boat. Then I would sail out into an open patch and my world would now zoom back up to infinitely large only to shrink back down to almost nothing within minutes of the next storm coming through. With all these dramatic expansions and contractions in scope and scale happening within minutes and being repeated several times in a single 24 hour day I felt like I was living inside on some kind of cosmic accordion. And as my world conflated to be even more liquid than ever with the combination of humidity, wet clouds, downpours and the ocean surrounding me I am also struck by my growing profundity of cosmic facts such as how are more molecules in a glass full of water than there are stars in the cosmos and yet at the same time 99.999% of all that water and other mass is made up of the “nothing” of seemingly empty space between each electron, proton and neutron. So my day has been spent being entertained and awed by the experiential music of this cosmic accordion symphony that has been playing in the concert hall created between the infinitesimally small and the infinitely huge. I hope that with examples like this you can understand why I refer to my life as one of constant AWE: Adventure, Wonder and Excitement. This experience also provided me with more examples of what I commented on in a previous post about how our incredible brains create what I think can best be described as the most incredible simulation of what we understand to be the world around us. Our eyeballs are but one relatively small source of the input which feeds this simulation and we don’t see with our eyes so much as we do with our mind’s eye. One example of this in my case is the way I use Radar to help me construct the simulated model in my head of the world around me. You may be familiar with this from the sources you consult on the web or newspapers or nightly weather TV reports when you look at the Radar and satellite views of the world around you. In my case I have Radar on the boat and in addition to the more obvious use (to many) for seeing other ships in the area, I actually use the Radar more often as a way to “see” the weather around me. As my four kilowatt radome scans a much larger circle than I can see, especially when my world gets small in the midst of a storm, it shows me the shape, size, location and movement of each of the storm cells. This is all presented to me as if I am floating a mile or two up in the air looking down with Learnativity at the center of this sweeping circle and when I feed this into my mental model of my world at that moment I am able to “see” this much more extensive 3D space I’m sailing in. Today was also filled with lots more learning as I figured out the trajectory of each of these storm cells by factoring in such things as the vectors of my speed and direction with that of the storm cell and then add to this the circular rotation of the winds which surround each storm cell using all this to chart out my trajectory through them and know which direction the wind was going to be coming from at any given point as it swirls around me. Since crossing the equator I had to do a mental flip as well that reminded me of how I have to invert my thinking when I’m driving a car in a country that drives on the opposite side of the road from the last one you left. With the many different countries which have colonized the different countries here in the South Pacific the side of the road you drive on often changes from one to the next so Fiji was on the right hand side having been British and Vanuatu was on the left having been French. In my case today I had to switch my thinking to remember that winds rotate clockwise around these storm cells now that I’m in the Northern hemisphere and this enables me to know which direction the winds will clock around me as I sail through a storm cell. Wind direction is rather critical information for a sailboat and sailor as you might imagine! ;) OK, class, that’s your classes for today, you’re free to go now! I’m happy to report that as I look up ahead here just before sunset I can see the vertical bands of clouds breaking up to the north so hopefully first light tomorrow will show have me sailing into the day accompanied by the rapidly expanding phase of the cosmic accordion. My instruments also tell me that I am now about eighty eight nautical smiles from the outer east end of Majuro atoll and so as long as I can maintain the good speeds of late I should be able to make it to the mooring field in good light tomorrow afternoon. If you happen to check on a map or satellite photos of this area you will see that the Majuro atoll is a large east/west stretching elliptical coral atoll with just one pass in located a bit west of the middle of the northern coast. Even though I am only 88nm away from the outer eastern tip of Majuro atoll and that will put me within a nautical mile or so of the mooring field which is just off the capital city of Majuro, I have to get INSIDE the atoll first. The only pass into the atoll is located a bit west of the midpoint of the northern coast so I have to make a large U turn up around the outer east end of the atoll, along the northern coast, through the pass and back inside east end and pick up a mooring ball. This U turn is almost 25 nautical miles which will take me over four hours to traverse so I need to keep my speed up in order to cover the total distance and be able to safely navigate my way to the mooring ball before the light fades too much. The end of a passage is usually a bit busy with checking in and other duties but I’ll at least send out a short note to let you know when Learnativity is safely tied up to our new home base for a few months.
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