Atlantic Crossing Jan 29,09

Thur Jan 29,09

This morning I was on lookout as the Sun was rising. It is amazing to see the waves change colour as the
light grows. Thy start out almost black then as the light grows they get silvery grey highlights. Soon they
take on a polished steel colour and then finally as the Sun breaks through the clouds, that are almost
always on the horizon, a luminous deep blue.

I’ve tried to take pictures of the Sea to capture that colour but it doesn’t do it jutice.

After breakfast I laid in with the crew switching out the damaged upper topsail. The sail was switched out,
re-rigged and set in about 1.5 hours.

Later we had our CN class and actually got to play with sextants which was very cool. Then it was time to
try and set the stunsls again. This time a wind gust caught the middle one and flipped it up over the boom
which promptly speared the sail and ripped the sail across. So we down rigged the whole shebang. Buddy
has his work cut out for him wth two sails to repair now.

More later.

An email from King Neptune was posted on the scuttle today. It was very interesting and basically warns
that he will be visiting the ship when we cross the line to deal with the infestation of “odoriferous
polliwogs”. It also asked the Captain to pass greetings along to “Queen Chibley” :-)

We are only 550 miles from the equator so another 4 days or so.

Night watch was OK very warm but mostly cloudy. I tried to do some astronomy, identifying the 57
“fixed” stars used in navigation by comparing the star charts in a book with star maps but there were just
too many clouds. I found a planetarium program on my little laptop which allows me to set the date time
and lat long and it shows what the sky looks like. I even took that out on deck and oriented it with the sky
which worked OK too.

We adjusted our clocks back one hour last night since we are moving West slow but sure so now it is light
for most of our “night” watch. This means we will start to have shipwork of sorts to do at the end of the
watch.

Thanks for reading.
KJ