Open the below pictures in a full-screen slideshow by Flickr
June 18, 2009 – Gulf of Alaska, 57 06N 148 13W
by Herb McCormick
(June 18): Well before dawn this morning, a BBC World News report via Ocean Watch’s satellite radio told of a new computer-model study issued in London today predicting vastly warmer temperatures across the British Isles by the middle of this century. I wish I could supply full details, but at that precise moment I was in a deep discussion with watch-mate Dave Logan about what we might try to do minimize the drastic motion we were experiencing in an extremely nasty Gulf of Alaska seaway.
Sailors often refer to confused, messy waters as washing-machine seas, but the term is misleading. A washing machine cycle lasts for forty minutes or so and then stops. As the wind has shifted from the southwest to the southeast, the current conditions in the Gulf have lasted the last eight hours and show no immediate sign of abating. Some in the crew are a touch seasick-we’re withholding names, they’re miserable enough already-but everyone’s feeling at least a touch queasy. The only good news is that Ocean Watch, in her first real taste of downwind sailing in funky waves since her refit, is reveling in the mess, sometimes touching speeds of ten knots with a reefed main, staysail and jib. It’s safe to say she’s having a better day than the crew.
I mention the climate change report from the BBC because I may not know the exact figures quoted, but I’m pretty sure I know who issued the study: the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, the world leader in forming global circulation models that simulate how the atmosphere behaves and predicting how it will behave in the future. That’s because I just finished the chapter in Tim Flannery’s riveting book, The Weather Makers, on that very topic.
Every crewmember aboard Ocean Watch brought their favorite books aboard, and I borrowed The Weather Makers-not exactly a cheery tome, but a highly readable one I recommend to anyone interested in the effect of greenhouse gasses and climate change-from our Northwest Passage veteran, David Thoreson, whose extensive library on the passage is unsurpassed. David’s collection is well worth its own blog, and we’ll post one in the future.
One of the great joys of going to sea is the time it affords to indulge in reading, and everyone has been cracking a book or two thus far. Andy Gregory is currently engrossed in his father’s first, as-yet unpublished novel, a detective story set in Seattle. Actually, the men in the Gregory family are pretty annoying: Is there anything these guys can’t do?
Dave Logan has just finished The Big Year, a book he highly recommends about competitive birdwatching. I don’t even have a joke here. He’s moved on to a title called Broadsides from the Other Orders: A Book of Bugs. No one can accuse our first mate of not having an eclectic taste in reading.
Scientist Michael Reynolds recently completed Just How Stupid Are We?, and no, it’s not about a bunch of dudes who decided to sail around the Americas. The subtitle, in fact, is Facing the Truth About the American Voter, and lest one thinks it’s more pinko propaganda, the dust-jacket blurb presents the case that being either a Republican or a Democrat affords equal opportunities to be an idiot.
Reynolds has moved on to the classic coming-of-age tale, Two Years Before the Mast, Richard Henry Dana’s tale of shipping out in the Great Age of Sail, and Patrick O’Brian’s Desolation Island, one of the long line of sea stories in the Captain Jack Aubrey series. Reynolds is a watch mate of Logan’s and mine, and I get the feeling after all our nattering and indecision about putting in or shaking out reefs, that he wants to see how real sailors actually do it.
Speaking of real sailors, skipper Mark Schrader has been perusing one of my old favorites, The Sailing Dictionary, one of the better books I’ve found that breaks down the nautical lexicon into everyday understanding. But the captain may be abusing his newfound knowledge. As Andy Gregory came on deck last night, the captain ordered him, “Go forward and cheese that line,” which drew the only response-a blank stare-that it deserved. (To “cheese a line” is to coil it, according to the book.) If anyone is looking for a present for the captain, you’d be hard pressed to find him something he desired more than a copy of The Sailing Dictionary, published by Adlard Coles (it’s out of print, but can probably be found online). In any event, he can’t have mine.
Along with a pretty broad collection of reference books, I have two historical novels that I received as gifts that I’m looking forward to reading: The Nautical Chart by Arturo Perez-Reverte and The Gates of the Alamo by Stephen Harrigan. The latter author is a long-time writer for Texas Monthly and a favorite of my friend, sailing writer Dan Spurr, and me. For anyone who enjoys the sea, diving, or great travel writing, you can’t go wrong with Harrigan’s Water and Light: A Diver’s Journey to a Coral Reef.
“Of all the ocean’s ecosystems,” writes Flannery in The Weather Makers, none “is more endangered by climate change” than the coral reefs. I’ll take this opportunity to mention that no one understands this danger better than one of Ocean Watch’s main sponsors and supporters, The Tiffany Foundation, to whom we extend our thanks on a daily basis. We’ll be addressing this topic, too, as the voyage continues.
There are bookshelves galore aboard Ocean Watch, and while rifling through one the other day, I came across A Memoir by Louis L’Amour: Education of a Wandering Man, which caught my eye. As it turns out, another supporter of the expedition, friend and fellow sailor John Osberg, who even inscribed it, gave the book to us. Of L’Amour-and, I guess, us-he wrote, “If you think you’re well read, think again!”
Of course, John’s right. But before our travels are through, better-read sailors we hope to be.
- Herb McCormick with photographs by David Thoreson
*This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Stratos
*To add a comment to this story click on the comment link below the post title. Please direct your messages for the crew to crew@aroundtheamericas.org instead of submitting them here. Thanks for following the Around the Americas Expedition.
