Valkyrie at sea By Diana the Valkyrie (c) 1998; Valkyrie@TheValkyrie.com Part 2 - the Arm Wrestling Round Robin and the Sextant Update: 10/08/1998 to valkyrie After dinner, I went down to the Oval, which is what they call a sort of pub thing on the seventh deck, which was where our little arm-wrestling tournament was taking place. I was pleased to see that Linda hadn't shown up, but they didn't seem to think that was a problem, and we got started. Have you ever done a Round Robin? The idea is you have a sort of double circle, and the inner circle moves one notch after each round, and at one point the circles intertwine so the inner becomes the outer, and, well, I guess the easiest way to describe it is to say it's like a Lobster Quadrille. Anyway, the main point is that eventually, everyone has armwrestled everyone else, and you record how many wins, losses and draws. There's a time limit, and if there isn't a result within two minutes, it's a draw, otherwise the Quadrille can go on all night. So we sat in pairs facing each other and holding hands, and I started to see the possibilities in this, and started making eyes at my opponent, but he was a real macho sort, and told me that if I didn't want to get hurt, all I had to do was submit now and I could sit out the round. Which is not a wise thing to say to a Valkyrie, so I told him I'd take my chances, and I felt sure that he wouldn't actually hurt me, which is true but not for the reason he thought. Then someone called the start of the round, and we began. Let's get one thing straight. I am *not* short. I am five-five, which is a perfectly reasonable height, just right, in my opinion. My feet exactly reach the ground on both sides, so it must be right. But that does mean that my arms aren't as long as the six-three bloke in front of me, and what with his longer arms giving him more leverage, and what with the fact that my wrist was bent backwards because of his long arm, I was at a bit of a disadvantage. And he didn't seem at all unwilling to use it. Arm wrestling is supposed to be all about biceps; rotating your upper arm against the resistance of your opponent. The trouble is, when your opponent is about a foot taller than you are, it's more about position and leverage, and I had neither. But what I always say is, if you can't win the game, then change the game to one you can win. So I squeezed. I've got a good grip. I had a good grip to start with, and tearing phone books and bending six inch nails keeps it good and hard. You know those bathroom scales you stand on, that go up to about 300 pounds? I can grip one of those and make the needle go clank against the stop. So I gripped macho-man's hand, and he yelled in pain, I felt all the strength drain out of him and I just walloped his arm down, bang. All over. "Did I hurt you?" I asked innocently. "No" he said, while he wiggled and waggled his hand around, trying to make the pain go away. "Oh, well that's good" I beamed. "All change". "What was that yell I heard?" asked my next opponent. I blinked, smiled, and said "I think I hurt him a bit." He looked a bit puzzled, we locked hands, the tournament director said "Go", and I gave him the same treatment; crush - push - bang. "Yow!!" he said, and this time everyone looked round. I smiled sweetly, took his hand in mine and kissed it better. "You'll be all right in a few minutes" I said. My third opponent gave me a bye. "I think I strained something against the last guy" he said, "I want to sit this one out, you can have the point." "OK", I said, and he asked me abut Linda. "You share a cabin with her?" "Yes", I said, thinking, this isn't my favourite topic. "How tall is she really?" So I told him, she was really only six foot nine, it was the high heels that made her look seven-three, and the bouffant hairdo added the other five inches. He just stared at me, and I could almost hear the blood pounding in his groin, so I told him I was five five, five eight in heels. That didn't seem to impress him much. I hadn't thought it would. "All change" The next guy told me that girls shouldn't take part in arm wrestling tournaments or someone would get hurt, and I agreed with him, and squeezed him rather harder than I should have, so as to make his prediction come true. You know the point at which you can feel the little hand-bones sort of flow under the pressure, but you mustn't take it any further or something might break, and that wouldn't do, would it. He sat out the rest of the contest, and the next two guys refused to give me a contest, because he was moaning and carrying on so. Men are so bloody sensitive, you'd think he could handle a little bit of a twinge. "All change" The next guy looked at my card, noticed I'd won all my pairings so far, and decided to give me that round too. The one after him tried to stand up to me, but he was ever so nice about it, so I didn't hurt him any more than I had to. And that was the lot - the others just refused. I can't say I blame them, locking hands with a Valkyrie is a losing proposition unless you're wearing steel gauntlets. Linda hadn't turned up to award the kiss. Not that I particularly wanted it. What I wanted was to demonstrate indisputably that in at least one characteristic, I had Linda beaten seven ways from Sunday. Because no matter what your best feature is, there's always some man that goes gaga over it. Some men like blondes, some like women with hair that's the light brown colour that for some reason people call "red". Some like hairy women, some like smooth. Some like them skinny, some like them well-padded. Buxom, even. Burly even. Well, verging on burly. And some, bless their furry little minds, some of them like Valkyries. So, I find, if I pretend I'm not a Valkyrie, I can get some interest from quite a lot of men, but when they see what a Valkyrie can do, I get a lot of interest from a few. So there was me, surrounded by the dozen or so men that had just felt what it's like to put your hand in a vice and have it tightened, and I can see that a few of them are definite Valkyrie-admirers, when what do you supposed would be the worst possible thing to happen? Right. Linda. But she didn't just walk in. She stood by the door, which turns out to be one of her favourite tricks, because everyone knows how high a door is (the British Standard Door is six-six, or two metres in the new measurements) and Linda would stand by them to give herself some scale, and of course in her six inch heels, she'd be nine inches higher than the same door those guys had walked under without even thinking about headroom. Yes, Linda, all right Linda, we can see you're a tall girl, Linda. Grrr. So then she sashayed towards my group of blokes, and suddenly they weren't my group of blokes any more. And I looked at Linda, and I looked at the blokes, and I decided to go to bed before I started to get depressed. I woke up the next morning in the middle of the Bay of Biscay. I mean, the ship was in the middle of the Bay, and I was on the ship, and I suddenly realised that maybe a life on the ocean wave isn't what it's cracked up to be. Because this isn't the flat wet stuff you find in swimming pools, this is bumpy. Sea with lumps in. And the ship doesn't rock from side to side, oh no. It does this corkscrew motion. My eyes are telling me that the horizon is moving, my inner ear is telling me that the ground is moving (my inner ear doesn't know about ships) and my stomach is sending urgent messages to my brain that threaten to be displayed in a Technicolor Yawn. And then Linda wakes up, stretches, stretches, and stretches again, good lord how much longer can she get? says "Breakfast!" and I nearly lose it. "Are you okay, Di?" she says brightly, and I debate whether I have the strength to strangle her. And I think yes, probably, but I can't face disposing of 81 inches of corpse just now. So I settle for emitting a heart-rending groan, intended to convey the two thoughts "I don't feel very well" and "Don't call me Di". The first thought got through, but the second missed by a mile, because Linda pulls me out of bed and explains "You'll feel better up on deck" which sounds plausible, so I pulled on a T-shirt and a skirt, and follow her upstairs. In the cafeteria, I collected a cup of coffee, hot and black, and sat with my head in my hands wondering whether I'd feel better if I hurled now, or whether hurling would just make me feel like more hurling. And then Linda decided for me, because she danced up to the table with a tray full of sausages, bacon, fried eggs, and at that point it became academic what other disgusting items she had because I was out on deck and discovering first hand exactly why it's called "sea sick". Linda, bless her, followed me out with a glass of water, which made me feel better, a deckhand swabbed the mess away in a trice, I guess they're used to this, and Linda led me back to the cafeteria, where I sat and breathed carefully. Actually, I did feel a lot better. And then the second nav came by, I guess he'd seen my little performance, and suggested I go to the ships shop and buy an anti seasick thing they had. And he also made a date for after lunch for me to go and see his toys. Linda, thank heavens, stayed seated. Because I could see her seduction technique by now; her way of getting some action going consisted of sidling up to some guy and towering over him. Which isn't difficult when you've got 13 inches on the average guy; 19 with heels. Linda helped me get down to the ships shop, which was cutely named The Utopia Emporium, and they sold me a pair of elasticated bracelets with buttons on, and you wore them on your wrists with the button on the inside, and they were supposed to stop sea sickness. Well, I'm as gullible as anyone else, but not even I could swallow this one. But the shop boy was serious, he said it really works, they sell lots of them, and I thought, well, at worst I'm a few pounds lighter, and if the upside is a cure for mal-de-mer, it's worth ten times the price. So I put them on, and then Linda walked me round the promenade deck a few times until I began to feel almost frisky, maybe they worked, or maybe it was psychological, or maybe I was just getting the sea legs I'd have gotten anyway, and I began to think that although she might be the Cabin Mate from Hell as far as pulling the trouser went, Linda was rather a nice person really. For lunch, I had one piece of toast, dry. My stomach told me it didn't want anything at all difficult, and there was no point in being silly about this, I pay attention to my stomach when it tells me things like that, although most of the time I ignore what it's saying because it's usually saying "chocolate". And then my nice little second nav came and collected me and took me up to the bridge to show me his den. It was, of course, full of strange machines with flashing lights. "These are the computers" he told me, so I made the right ooh and aah noises in mostly the right places, while carefully noting that this seemed to be an all-male area, my favourite. Not that competition worries me, you understand, except from someone like Linda, who isn't competition in any sense, more like a sledgehammer squashing a beetle. But things are always better when there's no-one around to distract the men from what they ought to be doing, and that's how it was. Then my second nav opened a drawer and got out a sextant, and showed it to me. "Do you know what this is?" he said. "Looks like a Cassens and Plath", I replied, "you can tell by the scrollwork they put on the azimuth slider." Oops. Should have said "Sextant." So he turned it upside down, and sure enough it was a Cassens and Plath, I'd spotted that label as he was pulling it out of the drawer, and he said "I suppose you know how to use it then" in a disappointed voice. Serves me right for not thinking fast enough, he was proposing to teach me. "No, I had a boyfriend once ... " I implied that men are the source of all wisdom. "Show me how you determine latitude then." I asked. Which is the whole point of the exercise, because I have to hold the thing pointed at the sun, and he has to stand behind me with his arms round me, and I have to wiggle my bottom a bit to get the instrument pointed in the right direction, and pretty soon it was pointing just fine, and it was pointing pretty hard, and in my direction too, and I told him that he had plenty of latitude. And could we try this again round about sunset, possibly in my cabin? Where there might be even more latitude, plus possibly a bit of leeway? And then some bloke with a beard came in, and everyone stood up, and he looked around his bridge, and immediately spotted the anomaly. So he strode over to the anomalous item and asked my second nav "What's this then?". I'm not a this, I'm a who. "A, a, a Passenger? On my Bridge?" He made it sound like "A slug on my salad?" So I stuck out my hand and said "How do you do" and he automatically stuck his hand out, so I gave him a Firm Grip, not a really hard one, you understand, but just enough so he was a bit startled, and he said "Hello" and I said "I'm Diana the Valkyrie", and he said "The what?" Oops. "Do you want the long explanation or the short one?" "I want you off my bridge, Madam". Meanwhile second nav was turning an interesting shade of puce as he saw his prospects for promotion to first nav rattling down the heads. So I held up the sextant like an amulet warding off evil, and explained "I was just reading off our position, could we just check I got it right?" "What did you get?" "I got 39 North, I haven't done the longitude yet." He looked impressed. "Pretty good, actually we're at 39 degrees 20 minutes. You've done this before?" "The sea's in my blood, Captain", which isn't true, of course, but neither is it really true for anyone else who says that, except that the saltiness of your blood is exactly the same as the saltiness of the sea, and that's no coincidence, of course, so in a sense it is true. "Valkyrie, you mean as in Viking?" "Sort of." "Okay, see how you do on longitude." I grinned. Latitude is comparatively easy. A sextant is really an analogue computer, you point it at the sun, you point it at the horizon, the sextant measures the angle, adjusts for time of year and tells you which parallel you're on. Longitude, however, is a pig, and until the invention of accurate chronometers a couple of hundred years ago, almost impossible to get right. I looked round the bridge, but from where I stood, I couldn't see a clock. You see, to measure longitude, you have to compare local time with Greenwich Time. If you're 15 degrees west of Greenwich, your time is an hour earlier, on account of the world is 360 degrees around, and rotates in 24 hours, you can do the division yourself and you'll see what I mean. So, if you know local time, and you know Greenwich time, then you know your longitude. You discover local time not by listening to the radio, which doesn't work because everyone rounds their time to an hour, which means relying on it can mean a fifteen degree error in position, which is a thousand miles. So instead, you shoot the sun, meaning you use the sextant to work out where the sun is, since it's the sun that tells you local time. Well, that's simple enough, but as I was doing it, I was wondering where I'd find a chronometer. And then I realised, I don't really need one. My wristwatch is accurate to a couple of minutes, since it's a crystal-controlled digital watch, and a couple of minutes is only a couple of miles, and anyway I didn't think I could shoot the sun to that degree of accuracy, so I used that, set the sextant, read off the local time, subtracted GMT, converted hours to degrees, and announced that we were 10 and a half degrees west of the meridian. "So where are we?" said the Captain. I walked over to the chart table and bent down. There was the ruler and pencil for plotting the course, so I carefully drew a line to update the position, annotated it like the others with time and place, and looked up to see the captain looking not at the chart but at where my T-shirt had sort of fallen away as I leaned over. Oho! So, the captain is a Ladybumps bloke, is he? I stood up and squared my shoulders, and ever so slightly arched my back, and you know what that does, and I said "Can I come up on the bridge and do this every day?" I mean, if you don't make preposterous requests, you never get preposterous results. And even if the Captain turned out to be Valkyrie-resistant, there were all those other lovely trousers and No Linda! The Captain smiled, and nodded, and said "With you around, we can ditch the bloody GPS", and second nav went from puce to purple. And then I remembered what time it was, and said "Oops, must dash" and trotted off to the Sun Deck. Always leave them wanting more.