Sea day #4
Blue Sky, Noon Temp 51
Sunrise 4:23, Sunset 8:43
This morning found us out in the Irminger sea somewhere between Greenland and Iceland.
It was a typical sea day (except that since we lost another hour last night we decided to set our alarm a little later and instead of exercising we did penance by going to Mamsen’s for waffles).
The first lecture this morning was a dive into the history, geology, and culture of Iceland.
The next event was the “Order of the Blue Nose” ceremony.
This is a ceremony to ask Posiden for permission to cross the arctic circle.
With the exception of one very small island, the rest of Iceland is below the circle. However we will cross it a couple of times as we sail around the island.
So permission must be obtained – by sacrifice – in this case supplicants dive into icy water, quaff a draught of [ ] and receive a symbolic blue nose.
We didn’t all jump in. We delegated a sampling of us for sacrifice.
After lunch the next talk was about the eclipse.
Our resident rocket scientist talked about eclipses, astrophysics, advanced geometry and such.
His basis was that a situation where one thing crosses in front of another thing is a great opportunity to learn. His examples included the proof of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, the use of the transit of Jupiter’s moons in establishing distances in the solar system, and the identifying of planets circling distant stars.
Bringing the topic back to eclipses he identified 14 things we have learned from observing eclipses thru the years.
The weather forecast tomorrow calls for clouds.
Of course the forecast has been for clouds all week and every day has been beautiful. So we’ll see.
But in the event we do have a cloud cover at the wrong time…
Then it was time to exercise.
While we huffed and puffed we missed the Port Talk so we viewed it this evening on our stateroom TV.
The last event before dinner was another Russell Lee story – this time the economic boom and crash that Iceland experienced in the early years of this century.
You may remember news about the possibility that Iceland would take out bankruptcy.
He did a good job of making the economic concepts understandable.
After dinner it was back to the Stateroom to watch the Port Talk, Blog, Read, and get ready for our first stop in Iceland tomorrow.
So the adventure continues.
Till then,
R