Things on cruise have been going pretty good. I’ve been busy standing
the 04×08 watch, and the 16×20. So it’s from 4-8AM and PM. We call ’em
mirror watches. I’ve spoken with Alison about watches, and she’s a fan
of the 04x08s as well. I sometimes find it a little hard to get much
sleep between these watches though! I would need to get into bed at 2000
(800PM) and be asleep right away so I can wake up at 0310 and get
dressed and assume watch at 0345. Early mornings for sure. But it’s nice
to catch the sun rise and sunset. Magically, by the time watches roll
around again, I’m fairly re-energized and ready to stand the four hour
watch.
Recently I’ve been standing as the cadet watch officer CWO. As the CWO I
run the bridge, radars, electronic charts, our vessels cross track
error XTE our left/right distance from our intended track line. I
maintain the ship’s logbook, do weather observations, and stand a look
out incase other vessels come near. We’re certainly out in the middle of
the ocean now though! I haven’t seen any vessel, or even caught an
electronic beacon from another vessel in about three days. And we can
sense stuff at around a 50 nautical mile radius! A lot of big blue out
here.
Celestial navigation has been a real challenge, and fun too. I’ve been
using my sextant everyday. Up until today, we’ve been overcast much of
the time. That has made shooting moon, stars, and even the sun
difficult. There are two main goals with celestial navigation. First to
fix your position in the ocean to a spot within 5 nautical miles of your
actual GPS reported position using nothing but your brains, a few
reference books, and your sextant. The other goal of c-nav is to figure
out how much error your gyro compass has. A regular compass uses Earth’s
magnetic field to point to (near) north. Our gyro compass simply point
in the same direction we point them in when we turned them on. When we
turn them on, we always point them at true north. As the voyage goes
one, eventually even the best of gyro compasses begins to wander off
true north, and we need to determine that by comparing the direction of a
celestial body appears to be (by the gyro compass) and the actual
direction to that body we calculate by our brains and books. While a
small part of celestial navigation is very romantic, 90% of it is number
crunching! Ah well.
I have one more watch as CWO this evening at 16×20, then we’re off to
“professional training” next week. I’m looking forward to switching it
up a little bit, getting regular sleep, and doing stuff that isn’t quite
as difficult as running a bridge of the TSGB.