Charting and a Day to Relax

First off, I thought that in the last post I had mentioned that this is now the 2011 interim, the fourth biennial Harness the Wind trip. I'm sorry if that wasn't clear initially.

On Friday in the classroom we talked a little more about the weather and introduction to chart reading. I have always been fascinated by cartography. Almost every time there is a map around, especially a weathered one (not to be confused with a weather map, though they do intrigue me too) I get bored because they require more instruction to understand than a regular chart or map. I read a book once on map theft called "The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime". It was on the history of maps and the collectors market surrounding maps all set around the premiss of a nameless map thief. Sadly, though, the name of the author escapes me. I highly recommend it, and it is between 200-250 pages, so a fairly quick read. But I digress, I don’t know what it is about maps that I find so fascinating. It might have something to do with the fair amount of critical and quick thinking that has to be done when you are trying to find a specific point. I was on a week long canoe trip once, and about the fifth day the leader of the trip realized that we wouldn’t be able to make our extraction point on time if we held to the route we had been following all week long. So a friend of mine and I sat down, pulled out the maps, and plotted out a couple of ways that we could get to where we needed in the remaining two days based on the pace we had been traveling. Learning how to read depth and navigational markers was great.

Yesterday, since it was the weekend, there was no sailing, but instead we headed out to Myakka State Park. We rented canoes for two hours, and some of us paddled around the lake, while others paddled up the river. All of us, however, saw lots of the Florida wildlife. One canoe counted seeing as many as eleven alligators. There was also seen a flock of spoonbills, which apparently is a rather uncommon occurrence. After we returned the canoes and ate lunch we went up the road a few miles to Siesta Key Beach. The sand on the beach was white and powdery. Because of how white it is, the sand remains cool even though the sun beats down on it. It was also packed very tightly, be it in part because of the number of people that travel over it, or the material it was made out of or some combination of the both, I don’t claim to know. But I do know that the density of the sand created a very cool effect. I was laying on a towel with my ear to the sand, and for no reason in particular I started tapping on the towel. In normal sand when you do this you can hear a dull thudding. On this sand, however, instead of a thudding, it sounds more like a someone rapping their knuckles on a hardwood door with a slight metallic twang. The sound could be heard by some of the people in the group who were ten feet away. I thought it was great.