23-hour Days

Oct. 4

6:46 pm – Every day at 2 pm we’ve been adding an hour to the clocks to keep up with the time zone change. It’s really affecting my appetite. Or maybe that’s the constant rocking motion of the boat… too many variables to adequately discern – the jury’s still out.

I’m trying to keep up with my 100 pushups regimen, from 100 pushups.com, but again, the rocking motion leads to an unaccountable shift in the forces required to lift myself up. Some pushups are worth double, while some only worth half. You’d think it would balance out, but it feels more like it’s overall harder.

As we exited the St. Lawrence yesterday afternoon, there was a short round of whale-watching. You’d clearly see the jets of water spray up, then hope to catch a dorsal (?) fin pop out. If you were lucky, a tail. I saw a few tails, and then, about a half hour later, a few dolphins (or maybe just smaller whales) actively jumping in and out of the water alongside the boat. Couldn’t get a good picture though.

I hate to turn a fun, harmless activity into yet another ecological moral lesson (though I guess that’s gonna be the overarching theme of such a no-flying trip), but I was reminded of the episode of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos entitled “The Persistence of Memory,” (check it out) in which he describes that whales likely had a vast worldwide communications network in the oceans until we silenced it unknowingly with our constantly rumbling loud and large sea machine, one of which I am onboard. I guess the whales that I would see today will have never known anything else, and so they have nothing to miss, but it is something I think about nonetheless.