The old ship rolled on in the restless sea. The sky is clear, but there is still a lot of mixed waves from the big storm. On a ship this old, she would be steam, however we are down to one boiler. (ok?)

Steve is our Engineer, he and his crew are trying to get #1 back on line. The storm also took out our electrial board. Poor Moe, He was wearing one of those stupid shirts of his, when the ship took a big roll and it tossed him into the pannel. He's burned real bad, we coated him with grease but it don't look good for him.

It's now two hours into the afternoon watch, just past four bells.

I'm getting ready to take my first afternoon sun shot. I'll use this for my LOP, (Line of position) I'll take a couple of more as the day goes on. It looks like clear weather tonight, so I'll be able to get a fix then.

Oh, let me introduce myself, I'm Fred, the second mate of the Possum. Possum what a name for a ship, Heaving Pig would have been better. She was built in the early 30's, sort of a Liberty Ship Prototype. We're about 450 feet long, and about thirty feet wide. We draw about 20 feet, loaded. This trip we have 42,000 Tipples in the fwrd hold. Tubbles & Banjows ('bout 35,000) in hold #2, then aft of the house in hold number three, we have 17435 accordions. The last hold, number four, cotton, took five days to load all that cotton, pack it in then screw it down. Then when we were in Qubec we loaded some timber on the deck.

We have a few passengers on board this trip, what a bunch of down and outers.

I'll tell you more later, right now I have to check the chromerters, we have five, and I check them against each other. Navagation by sextant is the only realiable navagation now. Oh you hear stories about LORAN, it works great, developed during the last war, but it dosn't work everywhere, and not here.

Hmmm, lets see, they are all set to Grenwitch mean time. So they are right on the money if you lived in Grenwitch England. They are on the 0 longatude. Here is how it works. We just left Panama. If it's midnight in England, we are about five hours behind them, So it's 19:00 hours at Panama. Now this morning we were at about 120 degrees west Lon. Or about 8 hours from Grenwitch. We have been making about 12 knots per hour sence this morning. So thats about 96 knotical miles sence 06:00, ships time. (or 4 bells in morning watch) Each degree of latatude is about 60 knotical miles, so we are at about 121 degrees and about 36 min. Each knot is about one minuite. This isn't real accurate, but it gives you the idea on how it works. This sort of works because we are near the equator.

The clocks look OK. Each is off a little bit, but I have a chart with the error rates, so I can get down to the second. Today, I'll use #3 and set my hack to that.

Ok, I have to go to work now. Are you in the pool for the noon to noon run?