AncienTrails

Sprint Waxing Moon of the Southern Cross

24 degrees 33 minutes South 73 degrees 19 minutes W

Wrote an entry yesterday that said I was (am) sick. A cold. Must have eliminated it in my fog headed stupor.

Now feeling better, some. Lots of rest, water and watching the gray ocean go by.

Since we left the sunny Inka Department of Peru, we have sailed out into the Humboldt current which comes up north from Antarctica bearing frigid waters and, I assume, creating the low, totally overcast sky.

We left the Inka Department at 5:02 pm on November 2^nd, (:02 because a few crew had not turned in their Peruvian Andean identity cards which we all had to have while in Peru.) and since then have been on an ocean that, from the starboard side, has looked the same, iron gray with a few swells and no sun.

The change from Inka was dramatic, sudden and complete. This last day and a half we could be crossing the Atlantic.

Kate’s busy with laundry and reading the Game of Thrones, the uber long quadrology by George Martin which I finished the night before we left. He has a fifth book out now, which I purchased, that came in at 1,200 pages. I’ve not started it because I wanted to live in different fictional worlds for a while.

I’m on my fourth now, REAMDE, by N. Stephenson, a cybersci-fi guy whom I’ve always enjoyed.

The third read was Ilium by Dan Simmons. Dan, a Wabash grad, my college, too, wrote a tour de force of literary and science fiction with the Iliad as a through line, but with background narratives that included Shakespeare’s sonnets and Marcel Proust. Guess you could call this beach reading from the ocean side of the beach.

Kate and I just discussed an interesting factoid I picked up in my reading. The hairless dog, found in Mexico and Latin America, has a body temperature higher than the typical 102 of other dogs and, as a result, has a role as a therapy dog (literally) for arthritis sufferers. We met one near the Palace of the Dragon in Trujillo. He had dark black skin with a few orange-red hairs along his spinal column.

Tomorrow we hit the half way point in our journey. We’ve adapted to the life aboard ship with easy food service, Walid to clean the room, a slight rock to the bed at night and journeys from deck to deck, then, on occasion, ashore in a new city or a new country. This is roughly the point at which we would go home from a longish trip and I’ve wondered what it would be like to go past the point where relaxation had come to dominate. Now I know.

At 18 knots it takes a long time to pass through an entire degree of latitude, a matter of hours, so it is easy to why those early voyages by sail counted their journeys in years. Paying attention to the degrees of latitude as we moved across the equator and south of it I began to wonder where our Twin Cities latitude of 45 degrees, halfway to the northpole from the equator, would fall in South America.

Took out the map yesterday and looked. We cross 45 degrees South latitude below Puerto Montt, Chile, about 2/3’rds of the way down the very long country of Chile, 12 degrees south, for example, of Buenos Aires on the eastern side of the continent. This puts the Twin Cities in the same geographical location as the beginning of the Chilean fjords, well into the fuzzily defined Patagonia. Halfway to Antarctica.

Though we have not really encountered spring weather so far, I’m pretty sure we’ll find some at our first stop, tomorrow, in Coquimbo, Chile where I will take a shore excursion into the mountains to see the Cerro Tolo Observatory. I hope to see spring flowers.