One year ago today: July 7, 2013, Uma goes to seed.
Five years ago today: July 7, 2009, memories of Borocay.
Ten years ago today: July 7, 2004, Galileo and Ida.
MORNING
Up before dawn to do the quiet work, here is the next stage in the pod renewal. The small jockey box at the front served mainly to make the unit look like a work trailer. Now that I’ve been stopped and checked out and know I’m well within all safety guidelines, so what if it looks like a camper? The new rig will be 40% again as spacious. You can see the jockey box lid open to reveal the beautiful blue interior. That whole box is being trashed.
So, I went to the beach. In the summertime, honest. And I got an actual sextant reading before the heat drove me back. Since it was not at sunrise, I took a sun reading. Duh, I know somebody will think it, no, by definition, you cannot take a sun reading more comfortably by standing in the shade. Sorry if I lost anyone there, Patsie. What did I learn? Most importantly, the sextant is amazingly accurate but it is also finicky. Once you get the hang of it, there is nothing to measuring the sun to a tenth of a degree.
But getting there can drive you bananas. There are a series of sun filters and another set of horizon filters. They turn the sun usually blue and the horizon orange, but I can only speak for my model, the Davis Beam Converger. The wise man starts with all the filters on, and selectively removes them one at a time. The problem is there are around 4800 combinations and you regularly get trapped in a mode where one filter means either the sun is too bright or you can’t see a thing. I did it by trial and error today. Filters are something that will take practice.
The reading I took at 10:50:15 is local time, but that has to suffice for my noon sight. Out on the ocean, parking isn’t $1.50 per hour, and even that’s no thanks to Ft. Lauderdale city council. My reading was 55° 00.1’ at 10:50:15 AM. The sun appeared almost due east, an illusion because Florida roads are rarely true north-south but your mind tells you so. No compass readings, however, as they are not part of celestial navigation. Didn’t know that, did you? Neither did I, but if I found that out first, that’s a bragging point, kind of.
NOON
Next stop was Five Guys for brunch. The place is empty until mid-afternoon so I get to use their big tables for my nautical gear. I went over the calculations I’ve learned in an effort to understand rather than memorize. I advise anyone who thinks their IQ is over 105 to give this sobering exercise a try. I found the figuring easy to do when you get example numbers from the textbook. You look up the time data on the tables. But, but, there are at least four different kinds of “time”. When they don’t give you the one to use, which is the correct choice? Back to the books. Little gems like this hour thing can stop you cold. I'm developing a healthy distrust of "school-taught" navigators.
Things are now complicated to the point if you try to memorize the steps, you’ll screw up royally. One favorite lookup is Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). But is that the time it actually is over there at this moment, or is the local time used to look up the GMT? Don’t ask me, the table is just labeled GMT.
Next move is I would like to take some star sightings. For some reason, I plain work better with real data than with samples. I’ve always been that way, so it is probably a motivational subconscious drive. I can only plan so far ahead with limited knowledge. My nearest horizon is the beach, which faces eastward. Miami is mid-latitude, so I should be able to spot familiar stars to both the northeast and southeast. Thank goodness I know the constellations and only have to pick the relevant star in each. Rigel, Aldebaran etc. without consulting star charts. This subject is ‘confunding’ enough already!
Also, if you are following along, don’t bother download the “free” MicroSoft Nautical Tables for 2014, called NavSoft. They are “secured” so you can’t print them. Open them with a third party reader. MicroSoft. Complete, utter, useless, insensitive assholes from the word go. To defeat the no-print for single pages, just to a ctrl-PrintScrn and crop what you need. Yes, I do have a bone to pick with MicroSoft because they advertise the tables as free. If MicroSoft does something to the file so you can’t use it the way you want, then it isn’t free. And I hate liars.
Years ago, when I had the computer shop, one of my more popular courses was how to work around MicroSoft roadblocks. The wildest part of that course was the number of people who put up with MicroSoft crap for years, thinking that was the standard and they had no choice. They actually thought you had to “upgrade” for things you didn’t want and that such things as being unable to clear the print queue were normal. They were shocked to be shown how many deliberate and dastardly things MicroSoft was doing to them because MicroSoft knew they didn’t know any better. What a rotten corporate philosophy, Redmond.
AFTERNOON
The camper pod is gutted, all the electronics are removed and inside here on the bench. The box is moved forward and the braces are cut. This was possible due to an overcast day and a west breeze. Things are proceeding faster than last time, when it turned out I was over-concerned about size, weight, and weight distribution. Plus I scrambled for every last cubic inch of interior space. Now I know I’m hundreds of pounds under spec. As for interior space, I know the mattress and blankets aren’t the least fussy about exactitudes. There’s not much to see, but this was the most unique event today, so it gets blogged.
To move the largest piece only required removing four bolts. Again, I took many lessons from early German tank designs to make upgrades easy. The lid removes with two bolts, all accessible only from the interior. The old jockey box cutout remains, as this is a kick-out emergency panel.
The blue strips are where the old side strakes were bolted to the body. The new “roof” will slant upward from the front to the 42” mark, just enough to hold the solar panels. From there, it is a flat 28” high to the back edge, forming a large enough box at the back to kneel in or sit upright. This section of roof, like the old one, will be hinged so if desired, I can sleep under the stars. But warm and cozy, up off the ground. After the great 8,088 mile pod trek of 2013, I’ll never sleep on the ground again by choice.
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