So today I’ve the honor to write a blog. Funny word, a blog, what is its origin? I know a log. Onboard we have an actual log. Logs already exist for a couple hundred years and are used to measure the distance a boat travels at sea. In the early days this was done by using a rope with knots in it and at the end a flat piece of wood or a bucket. The idea was that when we throw the wood overboard it would stay still in the water and then the rope would be on a nice coil and go overboard. You would wait for a certain period, stop the unwinding rope, and count the number of knots that went overboard. And then if you measured for example for 1 minute and you would have 30.8 meters between your knots you would immediately known how many knots (sea mile per hour) you were going. You would do this on a periodic basis and write this down in the logbook. We onboard have a log that turns in the water. The faster it goes the more distance we travel. This can also be used to determine the speed. Nowadays if we talk about logging, we just mean that we are going to write things down on a regular basis. This brings me to the word Blog. When the internet started, yes there is an age before twitter, people used to write a weblog, aka a log on the web. The ‘we’-part dropped (maybe because people mostly wrote it on their own in the beginning) and we were left with blog.
So, a nice story about (b)logs. This story resembles for me the role you have as a teacher on board of the wylde swan. There are so many things aboard of which you can ask yourself “how is that actually working?”. I personally have that fascination with the radar beacon we have. This is a thing that you can activate, and it is then visible on your or someone’s radar as 5 dots and when you are closer as 5 circles. But how? Does the radar “know” that there is a beacon? And why do they change from dots to a circle if you are close? Well, I will leave this as an exercise for the readers.
I think as a teacher it is really cool to be onboard and just try to understand the mathematics/physics/chemistry and engineering that is going on behind everything that (sometimes quit literally) let this boat float. If you then are an expert on some small area, you can give a really cool lesson about it. So have I tried to understand everything there is about lift. Really complicated but I hope there are at least some students that can tell you at home why a sailboat can sail close hold (aan de wind).
Oh, and yes, yesterday we had a nice day with internships, I did some painting with the deckhands and the food was again amezelings. We also set the mainsail, mainstay, forestay innergib and outergib. Many nice, as we would say in our own language “Swans”.
Greetings from het Swannetje
Otto (teacher)
