Today’s Chronicle can be found here.
I guess we should get going on that boat, though we still have – one day til the competition?! Augh!
By the time this post comes out, that ship will have sailed – one way or the other – so here is how our boat was constructed.
We started out with two empty book boxes that we secured from the library. We’d initially hoped to do something with the packing peanuts they contained, but we soon discovered they dissolve in water. Good thing we checked!
Among the most easily-available items was empty champagne bottles, so we decided to use those as our base:
But we soon remembered the boat’s size limits, so we had to shift those underneath so that the ship isn’t too wide:
We also went down to single bottles at the front and back, again to help with the width.
Melissa at Dolce Vita was able to provide us with corks to secure the champagne bottles, and the Panorama staff supplied us with garbage bags. It’s not pretty, but it should be waterproof!
The ship needs to carry “sailors” (beer cans), so we debated adding an extra floor to the inside of the box, but later decided against it. A later Chronicle mentioned something about seeing which ship is the “fastest”. We’re not sure what they mean by that, but we added a sail just to be on the safe side, and for the sake of aesthetics.
Soraia provided us with some Halloween decorations, so we made good use of those too:
We really struggled with a name. Our son favoured Storm Cloud and my wife and I liked Dark Cloud. We decided to roll a four-sided dice to determine who would get naming rights. Our daughter’s number came up, and she christened our vessel Mothership after the storm cloud of the same name:
Off a collage workshop with Kara – although the ship does not currently have a professional artist on board, we’re really glad that they’re running these kinds of workshops. And they have watercolours too!
Turnout was solid, and everyone was really supportive of my daughter’s efforts. Lots of great tips from the more experienced artists in the group.
Meanwhile, my wife and son went off to Nick’s lecture on the mammals of South America. He started off with an overview of Pangea and how it split up into the continents we recognize over millions and millions of years along with what animal species were migrating along as the continents shifted and became more (or less) isolated. My wife hadn’t realized that North and South America repeatedly connected and pulled apart.
Nick did an excellent job explaining convergent evolution, which is when species develop similar traits to fill an ecological niche in isolation of each other. Some great examples include koalas and sloths. We also learned that New World monkeys have prehensile tails that they can use to grab and hold objects – something that Old World monkeys lack.
Off to lunch at La Terrazza. Captain Freddie provides his noon update – seas are currently at 3 metres building to 4 to 4.5 metres tomorrow, at which point they are expected to ease off again. The period is 15 seconds, however, which should make it more bearable.
This sparks some conversation in which we debate whether there should be some sort of universal scale that factors in all elements (sea height, waves, angle of attack, period, and so on) to determine the level of seafaring discomfort. We have not yet officially named the scale, but I wish to propose the “barometric and refractory forces opposing regular transit” – or the Barfort scale for short.
While the seas will be easing, we are again deeply uncertain as to our ability to undertake the zodiac cruise at Alexander Selkirk Island – but we would be thrilled if we get to land at Robinson Crusoe Island.
More boat building, and then it was time for trivia. I correctly identified Diogenes as the gang to which Mycroft Holmes belonged, while my son knew that the colossus of Rhodes was a statue of Helios. He then corrected Soraia when she said he was a sun god – he was indeed a sun titan. Our 15 of 16 score was enough to take first!
The kids joined my wife for the biomicry workshop. Sarah began with Velcro – a now-essential human invention that was inspired by burrs and the way they have those pesky little hooks which cling to everything.
From there she started a matching game. Everyone was given one of two cards – either an animal / natural world card or a human technology card. The goal was to find your match and discover how the natural world was inspiring human technology.
My wife’s card was vaccines and her match was tardigrades (water bears) which are able to dry themselves out through anydrobiosis for up to 120 years or until they’re rehydrated. This inspiration is being used by two companies in different ways to protect live vaccines without refridgeration. The first company has created chemical barriers can shrink-wrap the vaccine until rehydrated, while the second is using a glassy sugar film to coat the vaccines. As a result, we now have longer lasting vaccines – which is especially important in tropical and remote regions.
Meanwhile, I swung by Zagara to put my name in for the spa credit raffle – only to be told that they didn’t think one was running today. I returned with the Chronicle to confirm that it was indeed running today. The clerk took my information, but I never heard anything back – irritating, but not critical seeing as I doubt I’ll have time to use any further spa credit later this trip.
Dinner time – we had another Indian dinner in our suite. It was delicious, but not quite as exceptional as the first time around. We still ate every scrap of the chicken tikka masala.
Then off for an extended meander around the ship’s walking track, the first time we’ve done so this voyage. The swell is a bit disorienting, but the extended period between waves really helps.
It’s also strange for the sun to still be high on the horizon after 8 pm when we’d gotten used to it setting around 6:30 to 7:00 pm. (Though it’s only now that I’m sitting down to write this that I’ve realized the days will be getting longer as we continue further south.)
And then – off to bed, with fingers firmly crossed for tomorrow’s boat competition.