Last night the wind dropped to an almost flat calm. We were ghosting along barely keeping steerage way. The sky was ablaze with stars. It’s odd to see Polaris so low in the sky.
There are starting to be new stars to the South that I have never seen before.
Lookout was really cool. The calm suface of the sea has alot of flashes and sparkles from small sea
creatures. Occaisionally there are diffuse bursts of light that are coming from deeper down. There is an
almost constant haze that masks the horizon so the sea just seems to turn into starry sky without a break.
Today is Christmas Eve and all morning there has been a beehive of activity with present wrapping and
decorating. The ship looks quite fancy in her Christmas sparkly bits :-) There is Christmas music
playing from someones Ipod on the welldeck and the there is a bright blue cloudless sunny sky above and
a calm deep blue sea below!
When I get off watch this afternoon there will be a Fancy Dress Marlinspike and tomorrow we have
present opening and Christmas dinner.
If the Thanksgiving dinner was any indication it should be great.
More later
It’s later, I just came off the afternoon 12-4 watch. Spent most of it stringing popcorn on thread. We also
calculated the speed of the ship by timing the passage of a piece of paper or popcorn a it drited along
beside the ship, the formula to calculate the speed in knots is 36/time for the object to drift 60.8 ft.
For the record we were sailing along at 2 knots.
When it was my trick on the helm I was instructed to sail her ‘full and by” rather than a specific compass
course. Sailing “full and by” means to sail as close to the wind as we can. The helmsman keeps his eyes on
the windward leach of the main royal sail, the highest and smallest square sail. It is braced in a little
sharper to the wind so it luffs first allowing the helmsman to correct by falling off slightly.
We had a very nice marlinspike with champagne punch and a prodigious amount of cookies baked by the
various watches late at night. After dinner which was a simple penne and sauce, we hung around talking
till the sun started to set below the horizon. As I watched the sun set Isaw the fabled Green Flash! An
awesome way to end the day of Christmas Eve.
Thanks for reading
KJ
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