Celestial Navigation

As the sun sank behind the land of many termite mounds that is Barrow Island, the Finnmarken hoisted anchor, put the sun to stern, and initiated its departure from port limits. Our journey into the Indian Ocean had begun. Apparently the low pressure system to the north is still of sufficient strength to continue cyclone demobilization. If history repeats itself, this cruise should take around six days; I won’t be going back to work until next month.

By 2100 hours the lights of Barrow Island were dim and distant enough to allow the cosmos to open up and reveal its full potential. I discovered last swing that while the Finnmarken is underway, the bow lights are doused so as not to blind the people on the bridge; the perfect place to check out the universe. After spending some time photographing the night sky, I dragged a lounge chair out from the corner onto the middle of the deck, reclined, and soaked up the view. It was as if someone had taken a swig of cold milk from the fridge while watching that video of the mother panda with her cub, and spit it out over a sheet of black velvet in a fine spray concentrated in a dense line with white speckles all about, when the cub comically sneezed and freaked out its mother. Or better yet it was like being in one of those high speed video scenes, in a pitch black room with black lights, as a bullet punctures a canister filled with pressurized white paint causing little vivid particles of white to spatter in all directions. You get the idea.

It’s difficult not to become nostalgic when starring into space. The night sky is one of those few things in life that will always appear constant. Even when your skin turns to leather, your hair falls out, your start losing people close to you, you begin to lose grip on reality…even after all of this, Orion will still be poised with arched bow in hand, Virgo will still be leaping in celebration on the horizon, and the Southern Cross will still guide you south. What a comfort. I can think of countless moments staring at the ever constant constellations, at the Milky Way. From when I used to drag an old cotton sleeping bag up a latter and onto our patio roof as a kid, back when my home town wasn’t drowned out by the city lights to the south, and always waking up completed drenched and miserable. Lying in a swinging hammock beneath palm trees on Kauai, after a long day of snorkeling and standing under frigid waterfalls. To driving home late at night from Monterey after my first year of college, listening to the 350 V8 purr through the firewall and Incubus croon over the stereo; my left arm hanging out of the blue El Camino, with the cool summer air blowing in from the wing window (also directing bees at my face…the one downside to wing windows). The Milky Way always present, never failing to make an appearance.

So as the night went on, I added yet another memory of the night sky to my mental stockpile; reclined on a cruise ship somewhere in the Indian Ocean, pitching up and down with the seas. The occasional shooting star racing across the sky, leaving a streamer in its wake. Trying to find that UFO we had spotted a few years back at Mono Lake…with no luck.

We had been traveling between the only two constellations I can find with any confidence down here, Orion to port (left) and the Southern Cross to starboard (the other left); heading east effectively. While gawking at the spectacle in my lounge chair, the occasional bright white gull flying overhead (which I kept thinking were REALLY close shooting stars), the points of light began to rotate around the ship until the bow mast put Orion on our port quarter (just to the left of left). At 2130 hours we had made about a 60 degree turn to the north; so by my deduction we were now heading north northeast. The ship would need to first sail southeast of Barrow and swing to the north to get around the shallow archipelago, before making yet another 60 degree turn to point the ship northwest; which should happen sometime early in the morning.

3/26/2011

I assumed based on my crude judgment of our course last night, that we would be somewhere northwest of Barrow this morning, out to sea. So I was surprised at how calm the ship felt when getting out of bed, I didn’t have to aim at a moving target to relieve myself, and even more surprised to see cargo ships anchored off the starboard beam. Turns out after examining the photos of stars from last night, and learning a few more constellations, my calculations were a bit off. The ship was heading south southeast before the 60 degree turn, putting us on basically an easterly course when I went to bed. We had never made that turn to the northwest, and we’re now at anchor in Dampier, along with the other vessels in the fleet. So much for another paid Indian Ocean cruise.