I was going to post about the recent voyage, but with no photos and
little to say I think I’ll pass. Instead, I’ll show off my latest
ropework project.
It turns out that you need about 50 metres of line to make a decent
sized doormat.
We’re off to sea again on Tuesday, and since there’s no groceries out
on the water, we load up the fridges and dry store before we go. Here’s
what the fridge looks like:
The ship’s chef could be a world-class tetris player with that
packing skill.
I had a working program for making the bunkplan and cabin sheets, but
it was written in O’Caml. I need to make binaries that run on Windows
and O’Caml’s Windows support is atrocious. Not only that, but somehow
the font-locking of emacs’ ocaml-mode breaks font-lock in other modes.
It wasn’t long before I gave up and ported the thing to Haskell just to
use the Haskell
Platform.
I haven’t listened to audiobooks for a while. We are unable to listen
using headphones when on voyage (for safety reasons - to avoid missing
alarms and so on) and I haven’t been doing much walking/running when
ashore. I just finished listening to Ten
Days in a Madhouse It’s fairly short, and I was able to listen to it
in a single session.
Well, I’m back in port again, having spent eight days sailing up and
down the coast with another school crew. I have no new photos and no
real new stories this time (though I missed some great shots of a fat
yellow full moon as it was rising). We took the kids out, everyone got
seasick, then they got better. Everyone cleaned the ship each morning
and stood watch through the day. By the end of it we had a great crew
who helped navigate the ship through the final two days of its
voyage.
There are some books where you get a sense that the author had an
enormous amount of fun writing them. Douglas Hofstadter’s Goedel,
Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid is one. Neal Stephenson’s Anathem is another.
Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s
World is a third and as it’s the most recent book I’ve read, it’s
the subject of this post.
This was probably the toughest voyage I’ve done so far, for several
reasons. It was the longest voyage yet at eleven days and ten nights,
plus we had an unusual voyage crew. The voyage was an exercise in
integration, so we had eight recent migrants and eight young Australians
who had applied through Rotary. To make things even more challenging,
some of the migrants came from the same background and even the same
schools, meaning they stuck together on board for a good chunk of the
voyage.
