At Sea
February 7th, 2025
This is our last day in the southern hemisphere – it is all going to be in the north from here on, well from when we actually cross the equator at midnight tonight.
At his noon announcement the captain said that we were 2 degrees south and 5 degrees east. This is probably as close as we are going to get to Null Island.
Null Island is a fictitious place with the coordinates of 0 degrees south and 0 degrees west, so not too far from where we are. It is said that this is where data goes to die.
There is no island in reality, just possibly a buoy. The buoy that was placed there, Soul Buoy, was part of the PIRATA system, a set of 17 buoys installed in the tropical Atlantic Ocean since 1997 by the United States, France, and Brazil.
PIRATA is not a Spanish political party, but the Prediction and Research Moored Array in the Tropical Atlantic. PIRATA was designed to study ocean-atmosphere interactions in the tropical Atlantic that affect regional weather and climate variability on seasonal, interannual and longer time scales according to their website.
Like the other buoys in the system, Soul Buoy was named after a musical genre. It was an Autonomous Temperature Line Acquisition System (ATLAS) buoy which means it collected data on sea surface temperature, subsurface temperatures at multiple depths, wind speed, air temperature, humidity, and pressure, and used satellite communication to transmit collected data in near real-time.
It was conical in shape, 12 ft high and was anchored by a cable to the seabed. The buoy disappeared less than a year after its installation and was replaced in 1998. The buoy was apparently decommissioned in March 2021.
So, in the real world, Null Island is just a lone buoy floating in the Atlantic off the Gulf of Guinea. However, in the virtual world, it’s a hypothetical pin-point where misplaced data points lurk.
The big question is, is it still there? Some reports say it has disappeared, some say it is still here. Alas, we will not get close enough to find out.
While I was pondering Null Island, things were happening on board, and I had to rush up to the pool and try to find a good place to watch the Crossing the Line ceremony. Yes, yet again the pollywogs on board will have to go on trial and get permission from King Neptune to cross into the northern hemisphere.
Just as I arrived, do did King Neptune (looking rather like John) and his lovely wife (Rhys), accompanied by mermaids
and a pirate or two.
They took their places
And were soon joined by the captain.
The fish was lying on a bed of ice, and was ready to be kissed
The goop was all prepared,
And soon the fun began with the Pollywogs kissing the fish, being smothered in goop, and then jumping in the pool, Shellbacks all now.
I was wondering why this ceremony was taking place now, when we aren’t quite at the equator, but of course, it has to take place BEFORE we cross the equator so that the Pollywogs have been given permission to cross the equator.
So now everything is in order, and at midnight tonight we can leave the southern hemisphere behind, and safely cross into the northern hemisphere on our way to Benin.
We passed the equator today, February 15, but since we passed the international dateline on February 13 and went right to Valentine’s Day, most of us were very confused about what day it was and where were but it was all good fun. The pool on Queen Anne is smaller than the other Queens, but with more people, so there are a lot of complaints.
But then you can’t please everyone
I hope your crossing the line and Valentines Day went well. My long red dress was bought for the good old red and gold formal days on the Queens. I do hope Valentines was a formal evening for you too!