TRANSVERSE SECTION · FR. 4
- ELAPSED
- 0:00
- WORST
- 0°
- SWING
- 0°
CARRIAGE AMIDSHIPS
TIDEBREAKER
The trawler is taking water and she will not sit still. Ninety seconds of the deck staying inside twenty degrees is the whole of the job; past forty-five she is gone and the cargo goes with her.
The gantry carriage is your righting moment. Swing the bob out to the high side before the sea puts the list on you — and remember the crates in the hold slide the moment the deck leans, so every list you give away comes back doubled.
Holding station.
The sea, the swing and the cargo are exactly where you left them.
One lever, one pendulum, and a hold full of ice.
- A / D · ← →
- Run the gantry carriage along the beam. Wherever the bob hangs, its weight is a righting moment. Carriage to port and the deck is pushed to starboard.
- SHIFT
- Hard over. Faster carriage, and a much harder kick into the pendulum — which is how you pump a swing when you want one.
- SPACE / E
- Damper. The crew takes the rod in hand: three and a half seconds, and the swing is dead. It refills slowly and it makes the carriage sluggish while it holds.
- ESC · H · M · R
- Pause, these notes, mute, restart the watch.
Why the cargo matters
Below about ten degrees the lashings hold and nothing moves. Past that the crates go to leeward, and once they are down there their weight is added to the list you are already fighting. Roll her deliberately to the other side if you want them back.
The deck hand
F sends a hand to the worst crate in the hold. Over about two seconds it is walked back toward amidships and its lashing is re-torqued — and for the whole of that time nobody is on the gantry, so the carriage sits where you left it and the bob loses its kick. Cargo still aboard at the end of the watch is now paid for by how near amidships it finished, not merely by still being there.
Why you will lose
Not from one big sea. From holding the carriage the wrong way and pumping the pendulum until the bob is on the wrong side at the wrong moment. Over-correcting is punished harder than the sea is.
THE DECK WENT
She rolled past forty-five and the sea had her.
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