EXCERPTS FROM THE DAILY LEVEL # 4

Friday, September 4, 1998

FIRST FICTION

Sea Level, N.C., July 28, 1998

...really, I have never been in any danger or rough seas....just plain luck, I guess....I was....my first third mate job was with John O'Pray, who was twenty-six years old and here I'm thirty-five...and... he'd been a cadet and he worked his way up the American South African Line....he was born in the tenement, raised on the fire escape....and....I think he was raised by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, because he said.... 'MISTER OTTINGER! WHERE DID YOU LEARN YOUR NAVIGATION?'.... he turned me into jelly.... and I tried and tried....and...oh, he would give me hell...so, we're coming back from East Africa and rounding Cape Agulhas, which is the lowest part of South Africa....and the Agulhas-bank is on forty fathom of water and extends out sixty or seventy miles.....so I put in the log: .... ah... "Vessel nearly steady and..... calm sea and a low... long low easy south-westerly swell" .... 'MISTER OTTINGER! DON'T YOU KNOW THIS IS THE ROUGHEST PLACE IN THE WORLD?'....it measures seas of sixty feet...that was the biggest sea they ever had... was sixty feet....I said...'but Captain, it ain't rough now'...and he said.... 'put something in the log to give us something to fall back on, in case we have any weather damage from the cargo'....so, that's how I learned to write fiction....

(Jay Ottinger)

Oldest living Junior Third Mate Jay Ottinger (93) is a resident of Sailors' Snug Harbor since 1982. He sailed on his first ship in 1919 and on his last in 1980. In 1994 he published his first book: "The Steam Yacht Delpine and Other Stories". He's now working on his second book. "I cannot type, but I just write it. The damn stories almost write themselves", he says.

 

SCIENCE FICTION

Understanding natural things involves describing them. The more accurate the description, the better the understanding. An accurate description is quantitative: a scientific measurement consists of a number and a unit. Every measurement is, in the final analysis, an approximation...

(from: PHYSICS, fundamentals and frontiers)

TIDES

Tides are the periodic rise and fall of the sea surface, occurring once or twice a day. Tides may be regarded as ocean waves of very long wavelength, whose motions are driven by the gravitational attraction of Sun and Moon and by the Earth's rotation. Because the tides are waves of very long wavelength their motions are strongly affected by their interaction with the sea floor. In the deep ocean the tidal range rarely exceeds 1 ft 8 in. In shallow coast waters, however, the tidal range increases, just as surf grows when it approaches a beach. This effect is reinforced in bays and estuaries whose natural period of oscillation is close to the tidal period.

THE INTERNET

Levels of information on the world's largest communicating vessel.

Level a: Usenet / comprises newsgroups

Level b: e-mail / comprises electronic messages

Level c: BBS / comprises Bulletin Board Services

Level d: TCP / comprises Transfer Control Protocol = http: graphic webpages, ftp: downloading files, gopher: search tools and telnet: individual dialogue.