EXCERPTS FROM THE DAILY LEVEL # 3

Thursday, September 3, 1998

 

THE HOBBYROOM LOG

- mouthpiece for the last of a species -

(E)QUALITY

Sea Level, N.C., July 27, 1998

.....I was extremely lucky....I mean, this place here 1) is unique....I come here and I figure, well, I want to do two more things in my life....I came here when I got to bad health and older, and I piss all my money away...I never tried to save any, so I don't have to worry about it....I got all this loot here and don't know what else to do with it...we're all treated the same....whether you were a best boy or Captain, it don't make a difference....you know.... some of these fellows have been up in the industry, like Port Captain or Captain of passenger ships, anything that just substitutes a wife and changed everythying.... but they come here and they want to be: Captain!, or... and then the governor had to tell them, it don't mean anything, everybody is the same....

(Horace Twiford)

1) here = Sailors' Snug Harbor at Sea Level, North Carolina. The Sailors' Snug Harbor admits merchant seamen and women who no longer are able to pursue their sea going career and who meet a basic requirement of at least ten years of deep sea service, after which admission is based soledly on need.

 

NOTES FROM THE PILOT HOUSE

St. George Ferry Terminal, Staten Island, August 17,1998.

 

...in fact we navigate by eye...on a regular trip, once we cleared the slips, it's like a river track...we know the courses there, we see the aids to navigation, it's a regular run... sometimes you just let her ride the current...here's our chart up here in the pilothouse...and then we have our radar, of course, and our radio, the eyes and ears of the vessel, and we have our compass...you'll see the buoys, the aids to navigation... we'll see them on radar, they're steel...and at night you can see their lights, their sequence and that...it's different at night, especially in the summertimes...we have all these sail boats...they sail in the dark...we got some real yachtsmen, they think they're brave...the guy has an outboard engine on his sail boat... he's tacking under sail in front of us...I like the sailboat and I say, 'look at this guy'...and I watch him when he's coming over...he has his outboard engine on, so he's under power also ...he shuts the engine off, lifts the outboard, now changing the rules of the road situation...I said, 'What?, Arghhhh!!!!'...I needed to make a fast move....and now we got a new toy in the harbor, which is really getting to be a concern...those jet ski's they have...they've been challenging a boat that had problems with them...they're crazy...they are all young kids and they want to come up and tap the side of the boat...one guy fell over and....he didn't get hurt or anything, thank God, but then the guy gave us the business, you know, the old finger after he got up...then the cops and the Coast Guard were waiting for him...they locked him up...this generation is very daring... the Coast Guard now has special cameras all over the harbor here, so they can see the vessels and everything...see who's coming and who's going ... they tell me they have cameras that can zoom in on the pilot house, so I said, 'gotta keep your clothes on, honey'...anyway, they have a highly sophisticated system...the radar sets we use on these boats are almost about five years old now...over the years we had this old fashioned system of navy ship plotting on oceangoing vessels...you know, the old radars see the targets and you had a plotting sheet, and you had to work out distance, time, bearings, course lines, use geometry...now, you don't have that anymore, this is all sophisticated electronics...I've done some navigating with the sextant ...you had the right books, the right stars, you knew the hemisphere you were in...nowadays they don't break out the sextant, because they got G.P.S.1) ...young fellows just push a button and say, 'Okay, we're here'... but they forget what makes G.P.S. run and what makes the ship run and if that engine room dies, and you're playing with that stuff and you don't have any of the basics, you're in trouble...I will tell you a little story...I have a lot of history on the Titanic, I found many discoveries, I started reading, and I learned so much, first about the ship itself, about the construction and about the historical background, and the interesting thing was the navigation...when they hit that iceberg, they gave a distress call and they gave a Latitude and a Longitude...they hadn't really taken a fix for twelve hours and she's going to twenty-one and a half knots and they lay down a dead reckoning course 2) and say 'Okay, this is our position'...so they tell the radio operator, this is our Latitude and Longitude...but when the ship hit the iceberg, she was still drifting, nobody stopped the engines, they never really reversed ... and she just drifts ... so, everybody's realizing they only have an hour and a half to live...but that position they gave on the chart, and this is in nineteen-twelve...they never thought of the 'set and drift' when they put that position on the chart...you had the Labrador Currents, you had these ice fields coming down there...so they're drifting and drifting...the ship that turned around, 'the Carpathia', and rescued them, kept locking onto that position...he ran fifty-eight miles at seventeen knots inside the ice, very slow...they went around the icefield, they didn't see any wreck...then, when they came out a third time, which was after the Titanic was gone...then they would see the four, five life boats altogether...but, it was that navigational thing, a thing we always get into here...it's a 'set and drift'...the currents will always move you, even at sea...you have current tables, which they had in those days too...but at that time, nobody thought of it...it's quite a story, and we just stumbled into this through historical reading....today, with what we've learned, we've come so far, and those kind of errors can always happen...you know, man gets so overconfident, especially in this business....

(Captain Eddie Squire on board of the 'J.F.K.')

1) G.P.S. = Geo Positioning System.

2) dead reckoning = laying the course line down on the plotting sheet, and measuring along this line the distance the craft should have advanced since the last fix.