What a start today, during my daily rounds, a shipmate informed me there were two dolphins swimming in the wakes on port side. They followed us for a few minutes, stopped, turned south, and disappeared. Too bad, I did not have my camera! When it is sunny in the mornings, it is beautiful to see the new sun, feel the warm subtropical winds, and listen to the wakes splash against the bow as we cut through the water. You could feel the salt from the spray on the handrails of each ladder I descend to go to another deck for conduct my dailies or to move about.
The weather turned hot in the afternoon and the calmness of the seas reminds me of sailing on the equator from the old “KA” days. I received a verbal that the dive chamber telephone was not working. Opened up the junction box and corrosion everywhere on the terminal boards and the wire brush could not clean it all off. It left me no choice but to bypass it, splice the wires together, and weatherproof the splice and the junction box.
We should be reaching our destination in about forty minutes. The plan is for us to “camp” here overnight and tomorrow will be a full dive day. Meanwhile I am looking over a program that was to be our database system. It did not pass muster and turned out to be a dismal failure. A lot of money was poured into this but the human factor seem to have done it in. No need to go into details but in summary many of the people who made the decision to implement it never had sailing experience in their background and it showed. Not much I can do about that except I did make some additions that made the program easier and quicker to use.
The evening is just gorgeous! Sun is setting behind some clouds and over to the starboard side was the beginning of a rainbow. The ship is slowly sailing around the pinnacles and will be doing so rest of the night. I got a call to go to the bridge to respond to a gyrocompass going haywire. There is not much to fix it. Technology has improved quite a bit and looking at the books there are no maintenance procedures. All I didwa is shut it down for a few minutes, start it up and let it stabilize. Despite of all the digital and advanced technology introduced in this system, the mechanics is still the same and it takes at least half an hour to find its true heading and stabilize.
Another day tomorrow and who knows what it brings. We will be here all day. The elements here are much kinder than what we faced at Necker. These islands from Oahu all the way to Kure are an interesting group. I will check to see if there is a web site that I can link to that displays photos from their dives.
Aloha, from the smooth waters of Gardner Pinnacles in the Papahanaoumukoakea National Marine Monument or the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
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