Climbing down from the royals was hard to do, not so much for the distance I had to cover (although that was challenging) but mainly to break myself off from that view. Feet set back firmly on the deck again, I went back to rotating between the different duties. One of these duties that I haven't covered is look-out.
No. You don't get to be in the crow's nest. Sorry to break it to you, but the Niagara doesn't have a crow's nest. Instead you tend to stand on the anchor house (the line attached to the anchor, coiled up all nice and neat), scanning the horizon for ships and other things a vessel doesn't want to collide with (rocks, icebergs, floating whale carcass, not floating whale carcass, a whale carcass that was floating until recently but is now sinking...).
Point is, you stand and let the wind hit you while you look around for other ship's lights, and admire the view. Admiring the view seems to be a steady theme. But your actual job is to report anything you see to the mate on duty. To drive the point home, someone once reported seeing a "Huge light on the horizon". It ended up being the moon. Someone reported the moon as an obstacle we might collide with. Point being, if you see it, report it. I'd much rather be warned about the moon then end up crashing into it, boy would we look silly then.
As we were relieved from duty by the next watch, I stayed on deck to get ready for bed. One of the guys on the ship had heard from some "crazy lady" on the street in Duluth that there was a solar flare, making seeing the northern lights much more likely. (He called her a crazy lady not for saying this, seeing as it was based in science and fairly reasonable, but because she stopped to tell him about it on the street with no solicitation.) Anyways, crazy lady was right. Just before I went below-deck, the sky to the north of us slowly transformed, finally erupting into a brilliant display of colors that looked something like a sunrise at just past 11:00pm.
I went to bed more content than I have in most of my life I'd imagine.
© Kyle Packer
No. You don't get to be in the crow's nest. Sorry to break it to you, but the Niagara doesn't have a crow's nest. Instead you tend to stand on the anchor house (the line attached to the anchor, coiled up all nice and neat), scanning the horizon for ships and other things a vessel doesn't want to collide with (rocks, icebergs, floating whale carcass, not floating whale carcass, a whale carcass that was floating until recently but is now sinking...).
Point is, you stand and let the wind hit you while you look around for other ship's lights, and admire the view. Admiring the view seems to be a steady theme. But your actual job is to report anything you see to the mate on duty. To drive the point home, someone once reported seeing a "Huge light on the horizon". It ended up being the moon. Someone reported the moon as an obstacle we might collide with. Point being, if you see it, report it. I'd much rather be warned about the moon then end up crashing into it, boy would we look silly then.
As we were relieved from duty by the next watch, I stayed on deck to get ready for bed. One of the guys on the ship had heard from some "crazy lady" on the street in Duluth that there was a solar flare, making seeing the northern lights much more likely. (He called her a crazy lady not for saying this, seeing as it was based in science and fairly reasonable, but because she stopped to tell him about it on the street with no solicitation.) Anyways, crazy lady was right. Just before I went below-deck, the sky to the north of us slowly transformed, finally erupting into a brilliant display of colors that looked something like a sunrise at just past 11:00pm.
I went to bed more content than I have in most of my life I'd imagine.
© Kyle Packer
