Captain's Log

July 18, 2006

Today was a first. While just starting to enjoy lunch, I was approached by the bridge watch with an urgent message from the Academy. It seems as though we were having a “Library Emergency” and we needed the on board assistant librarian to call as soon as possible. This is the first time in over 35 years at sea that I had experienced a “Library Emergency.” We quickly found the librarian and placed a satellite call back to the school and after about 10 minutes of conversation, the emergency was solved. It seem that our librarian on the ship, is the IT expert in the library and they had dropped off of the end of the earth electronically. All ended well.

While we were working on the library emergency, I received a call on the other satellite phone from the marine officer coordinating our delivery into Paita Peru. It seem as though they had finally figured out that it would be cheaper to truck the supplies from Lima to the mountains, than to pay for our port call into Paita. They thus requested we by-pass Paita and proceed to Callao. That we are now doing.

The last event for the day was to move the base station for the crew call phone to a public space as the remote phone stopped working last night and thus calls could not be made off the ship by the cadets or crew. That also is back into working order and we are in route to Lima.