CTY July 25-August 2 (why start publishing consistent dates now?) post 3

Boy, am I just happy as a clam after our dinner of pork stewed in chile verde sauce, yellow rice, black beans and tortillas. With the Lady Maryland docked in a harbor, the whole atmosphere is calm and contemplative, ideal for working on final projects (and, as it happened, a lesson on sail science).

All around are fishing boats, and had we sailed up eighty years ago there may have been just as many whaling boats. Tomorrow, we strike out into this historic city, to learn about its history of whaling, and more about whales themselves.

Yesterday, we spent the night anchored in the Elizabeth Islands, near Martha's Vineyard. We had a view of a beautiful, seemingly uninhabited Island off the starboard side of the ship, and beyond that, Martha's Vineyard itself, with a lighthouse whose sweeping beam could be seen by all of the anchor watches. Dead astern was the island of Cuttyhunk, with a quaint town nestled into its smooth hills. As any of you reading this may know, it was there that the students had a chance to call home, but only after taking a bracing dip in the ocean, the closest thing to a shower we're going to get. By 8:30, the sky was draped with low-hanging, blue-grey cumulus clouds, but in the west, off the port side of the ship, the clouds ended in a line, and beyond the line, a thin skyscape of different clouds lined in a color like the inside of a peach, if the pit were a fusion reactor. The sun dipped behind one cloud, bright yellow-orange, and reappeared below it, plum-red.

The students spent part of the evening carving scrimshaw, a pastime of the old whalers, who would carve patterns and pictures into whale ivory. We used tagua nuts, a common imitation ivory, and somewhat dulled needles, and filled the carved out lines with ink.

Today we made our easy way north, to the harbor where we are now situated. On the way, we let out the ship's trawl net and caught some downright exotic marine life. A baby shark, a large puffer fish, some weird looking shrimp (I'm blanking on the name), scallops, three flounders and a whelk were among the catch. The students sketched and wrote down numbers for each species, before we returned them all to the ocean. When your primary exposure to estuaries is the mere understanding that many of our largest cities on the east coast are situated along them, it is thrilling to discover the bio diversity that flourishes there, in spite of all the environmental challenges posed by humans.

That's all for tonight, we've got a big penultimate day of the trip tomorrow. With everyone well-accustomed to the routine of running the ship I think we will continue to enjoy every minute of it, if we have to haul the sails ten times.