Melting

The first discovery of my research is a rude surprise, that the Panama Canal fees, which had been stable for nearly a decade, would double on New Year's Day 2020.

With no possible way to get through the canal by the end of the year, I resigned myself to an extra few thousand dollars of debt.

While I rapidly fired off emails to festivals and friends across the seas, I kept a browser window open to track the ship's progress.

Because the satellite phone gadget that I bought from Mohammed, the Syrian refugee, pinged out a position every 10 minutes.

so I could watch in real time as the ship left a trail of digital breadcrumbs across a map of the Atlantic.

The ship zigzags downwind, drawing a series of repeated letter W's like a cat perched atop that single letter of your computer's keyboard.

I sent the crew a message to go slow, in order to buy myself enough time for all the research and outreach.

Fortunately, going slow is what our ship does best.

In fact, their ponderous motion stretches time in the opposite direction of a spaceship's velocity.

like an inverse of Einstein's relativity, because in our subjective experience, a few minutes literally means one hour.

GPS locations are traditionally expressed in degrees, minutes, and seconds.

One degree of latitude is equal to 1 360th of the circumference of this world.

Each degree is then subdivided into 60 minutes, with one minute equaling one nautical mile.

Now you can understand why airplanes also use nautical miles.

Because, unlike kilometers or English statute miles, nautical miles express a fraction of a circle, which makes them the most sensible way to measure long distances.

Unless you believe that the world is flat.

If water is flat, then that means the land is flat.

Do your research.

The globe is a lie.

Arca Cunardi sails just under 5 nautical miles per hour, which is about the velocity of a speedwalking granny.

So, a few minutes of distance on the charts will take us 60 minutes on the clock.

That's our peculiar relationship to speed, time, and space.

Although without getting into the complications of time zones versus ship time, or the biggest time mindfuck of all, which is sailing across the international dateline.

While reaching out to potential allies in Venezuela, Colombia, Panama and Mexico, I became distracted by events unfolding in nearby Chile.