I had lunch with the Captain today, to be said, for the best effect, in an off-hand manner, as one might say ‘I had a cup of coffee this morning’.
It is, in fact, a fairly regular happening, and I was today one of the seven people selected, if that is the word I’m looking for, for the occasion. It was a remarkably civilised meal, with excellent food and a cut above what the peasants in the Wardroom were experiencing: paté to start, followed by a filleted and stuffed trout and orange sorbet to follow. The Captain, as one might expect, is an accomplished host, and it really was a very convivial little gathering, lasting for the better part of an hour and a half.
Also today we carried out our pre-wetting SAT. This is an exercise intended to show that we could survive in an area of nuclear or biological or even chemical contamination. The mechanism is simple enough. As contaminants will inevitably collect on any metal surface, and hang around for ages, you make sure that such contaminants can’t reach the metal, and you do that by soaking the ship in sea water, through a series of spray nozzles, after all the external access points have been secured.
This was the first time we had tried this particular system on the ship, so it is perhaps not too surprising that as well as succeeding in soaking the Flight Deck and superstructure, it also managed to pre-wet a large number of the cabins on 2 deck, but fortunately not mine, I am pleased to say. We saw a video of it this evening on ITV, and it really looked rather pretty, though that, of course, wasn’t the entire intention.
The weather is none too good at the moment, with a very changeable wind and rain, as we are just entering the ITCZ – the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone – which, to put it in terms that a layman (me, for example) can understand, is where the weather systems of the south and north Atlantic meet and interfere with each other, giving very varied, but usually bad, weather. By tomorrow, though, it should have cleared, and we expect to be back in a hot, sunny, and essentially stable weather system.