Last night, on watch till midnight the surface became glassy smooth, undulating slightly as the ghost of a distant swell slowly flexed the surface. Scorpio hung bright in the West, its curled tail and sting piercing the smoke of the Milky Way. Amazingly the reflection was as bright, but stretching and bending as it passed through the Hall of Mirrors made by the gentle rhythm of the ocean. Around us on all sides the reflected stars shimmered, stretched, fell apart like drops of mercury and then rejoined again for an instant to make mirrored constellations.
Justin came to relieve me at midnight but I stayed up for an hour enjoying the night, before going to sleep with the throb of the engine in the aft cabin. I'd been reading a book called the Memory Code, recommended by Tom, our guide In Kakadu to give insight into the extraordinary complexity of oral memory maintained by the aboriginal people through their "song lines".
We discussed this for an hour in the starlight. The mnemonic methods involve walking through landscape attributing stories and songs to specific points along the way. The songs encode detail about thousands of species of insects and hundreds of birds and other animals, classifying them according to their value to the tribe and with instructions on how to eat them, and which to avoid. I've used very simple mnemonics e.g. to remember ten items in any order, but had never tried the walk through method in earnest. One needs to pre-structure the walk into clear stages, such as centuries, before attaching events
or names to each place. It works well if you make the association lurid, hilarious, ridiculous or bawdy. Astonishingly one can then forget the detail until you reach that place again, at which point the unusual image leaps out and furnishes the detail without effort.
I remember suggesting this technique to Rebecca before an interview, and she used it to good effect apparently. Justin also recalled similar techniques he'd used to get through the MBA exams at Cranfield. As an experiment I am re-reading David Hopson's book, Beyond Reason, to encode the philosophers into a memory walk around the food storage lockers and underfloor spaces in the saloon. So far Copernicus is in the battery compartment, which is the 16th century at battery four with his new theory in 1543 that the Earth orbits the Sun. Newton is set up with the rice and pasta in the 18th century, with a bar of seven colourful spirit bottles and their optics, to recall publication of his book "Optiks" dividing
the visible spectrum into seven, and poor Aristotle ("a bugger for the bottle" to quote Monty Python!) is on the bottom shelf of the fridge at 4BC which he shares with a crate of Hippos and a Kos lettuce to remind me of Hippocrates, who lived on Kos. I will have to see whether I can successfully encode all the information into the saloon lockers and still recall it later.
Technical matters; our Raymarine VHF 60 radio thinks we are near Japan. Not much use if I need to make a DSC distress call to summon aid. So having tried emailing Raymarine for assistance, I phoned them with the Iridium satellite phone, and got through to Portsmouth. Each call lasted 4-5 minutes before the signal failed. Each time Jo on reception would put me through to Spike in technical support. Once I got straight through. Thereafter I got lost in the queuing system listening to Spike's appalling choice of music! Occasionally I got through this and in fragments we diagnosed the problems over an hour, and finally this morning it was fixed! Extraordinary to be able to call for assistance like that!
Sea snakes seem to abound in the Indian Ocean. Mark and Justin had seen several, and today I was at last rewarded with sight of two, each about four feet long and quite two inches thick. The bodies seemed pale tan with light black bands on the upper surface. Their tails are flattened for easy swimming. Looking them up in the Marine reference book, I find that many are bottom feeders, nosing around cracks in the rocks to catch small fish. Others may lie around in clumps on the surface till fish congregate round the "debris" and are then suddenly snapped up. All are 50 times more venomous than land snakes. The sea kraits lay eggs on land, but the yellow bellied sea snake gives birth to live young, which then swim to the surface for their first breath of air.
Meanwhile the Australian Border Force are keeping a close eye on us. For the past two days a plane has flown low and interrogated us over the radio, whilst today a sleek coastguard vessel powered past at 20 knots without calling us.
Our soundscape changed while I cooked chilli con carne for supper. I'd bought a few CDs in Darwin to give some musical variety, including Leonard Cohen who I had really not listened to since the Fifth Form. Amazing how music can evoke a particular time, place and emotion......like the song lines I suppose.
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