Schroedinger's Flies

At Sea, N 33 38.21 W 077 37.81

(6/15/05) The weather was splendid when we passed Cape Hatteras. There is some kind of structure there. It looks like a 200 foot high Trojan Horse. Close up it looks like a lighthouse on an oil drilling platform, but it doesn’t make any light.

Overnight was another great one. Good wind nice weather. We made 119 nautical miles noon-to-noon. Today I tried for the first time to shoot the sun at noon to determine position. Someday, we have to lose the use of all GPS for some reason or another. I have a cheap second-hand plastic sextant that I bought on Ebay for practice. My first attempt gave latitude wrong by 3 degrees, and longitude wrong by 1 minute. Three degrees is a huge error, but for first try …

Today the wind ran out of steam. Not a total calm but we’ve been moving only 2 knots.

Suddenly two houseflies appeared onboard the boat. Where the dickens did they come from? We're too far out to sea for them to fly here. Now it’s four flies, eight flies, more. We’re invaded! The only explanation I can think of is that the flies were spontaneously created from the vacuum of space. Instead of electron-positron pairs that immediately self-destruct, flies are created in male female pairs that immediately start reproducing.

Or perhaps alien beings are salting the earth with their life form. "Flies in space." Yuck.

We decided to put in at the Chesapeake for a rest. The other choice would be to press on for Ocean City or Cape May, or to just press on to New York. It’s only 287 miles to NYC from here. But we need a rest. This business of 24 hours of watches with only two people is tiresome. We’re operating on a sleep deficit.

It’s too late in the day to make it to a marina near Norfolk. We’ll heave to off shore tonight and tomorrow at first light we’ll head for the bay bridge-tunnel. We’ll get there around low tide. We’ll find a place to stay in Little Creek Virginia, a suburb of Norfolk.