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The Weather Outside
[A rainy morning]
[Cadet Akitaya at the helm] “You’ve got to run efficiently,” Captain Weinstock said, with the hope that we could rejoin the Great Circle at about 48th parallel the after the weather had passed. Following some clarification regarding the difference between swells and waves, the captain dismissed Berkey and Mosel, who headed to the communications room to send away their own weather observations.
The deck department continuously observes weather conditions, recording them in codes on large, complicated-looking charts. Every six hours, the Bear is required to send this information to one of several strategically placed stations across the globe, which compile all of the incoming data and generate reports. This is a key component of the global weather network. With the help of instructor Sam Pecota, Mosel and Berkey attempted to radio their most recent observations to the Kodiak, Alaska station but there was no answer. Fortunately, the Honolulu station responded in the form of several beeps and immediately transmitted the Bear’s data to Point Reyes in California. [Weather logs]
[Cadets Berkey and Mosel, assisted by the captain, deal with the weather] A few hours later, the weather had cleared enough for some deckies to unleash their sextants and shoot the sun on the Helo deck. There many items on The Bear that look expensive, but the sextants are perhaps the most impressive. They each come in a beautiful wooden box and affect a feeling of antique precision in one’s hands. Using them to shoot the sun involves comparing the measured angle between the sun and horizon at a given time to a value in a nautical almanac. This information can be used to solve the complex problem of determining position if the GPS were to fail, but the afternoon’s remaining clouds were interfering. “I need a better horizon,” said 1st class cadet Bill Fitting. The horizon Fitting was looking at didn’t seem that bad to me, but he was interested in measuring our position to within three miles of accuracy (the perimeter of the earth is over 20,000 miles). What if it was raining, I asked him. “I would stay inside,” he said.
[1st Class Cadet Bill Fitting takes a pictures of his colleagues shooting the sun] Beside him, 1st classman Josh Paap was concerned that the strange weather patterns might by some means be responsible for an unlucky string of readings--they had all ended in sixes for some time now. He shrugged off his superstitions in deference to plan B: “The best way is to step in front of someone who already has a fix, anyways.”
[Josh Paap shows off his sextant and sixes]
[The bridge has wipers] -JSF |
At
sea, the weather is a big deal. This morning on the bridge,
while 3rd class cadet Levan Akitaya manned his
first ever helm duty through spotty rain on a 273º heading,
cadets Jenna Berkey and Alex Mosel prepared incoming weather
reports for the captain. They had a captive audience:
yesterday, the he made the decision to change course from
our Great Circle route to a near-dead west heading along the
38th northern parallel in order to avoid a low
pressure system moving across the northern Pacific. This
new heading has the potential to add up to 188 miles to our
trip due to the curvature of the earth; without changing our
speed, this would be equivalent to roughly ten hours of
traveling time. 
Back
in the training lab, Robbie Jackson had somehow managed to
diffuse some of his near-scary enthusiasm for the mechanical
timing mechanism of oil purifiers to the cadets in his
practical training course. First class cadets Tim Dorn and
Andrew Spoonemore, who were eagerly demonstrating their
ability to disassemble and rebuild the training unit as an
official part of their licensing requirement, seemed
unaffected by the weather four decks above. “It doesn’t
make a difference,” Spoonemore said as he literally stood on
the upper bowl of the purifier while Dorn pounded it with a
sledgehammer. “I would rather be in here till the sun comes
out.”
