Valkyrie at sea By Diana the Valkyrie (c) 1998; Valkyrie@TheValkyrie.com Part 4 - How to use a Sextant. Update: 24/08/1998 to valkyrie Linda ate like a horse. In fact, if it came to a contest, I'd back Linda against a horse any day. I guess all those inches needed calories, plus all that leaping about, cartwheeling, and rah-rah-rah burned it up. Me, all I have to do is look at a piece of chocolate and it goes straight to my thighs. Why is life so unfair? So as Linda guzzled everything on her plate, and "Oh, don't you want that, Diana?" quite a lot of what was on mine, I asked her where she'd gotten to last night. She gave me a cat- got-the-cream look, and said "Ladies never kiss and tell", but she was dying to tell me, I could see, I mean what's the point of scoring unless you can boast about it? "Ben Crump Him Self" she said proudly, as if getting some antediluvian saxophone player into bed was a major triumph. But then she said "And what about you, Di?" and I had to admit that I'd scored a duck so far, although I'd had my back scrubbed once, and the second nav was showing a bit of interest. "Nurture him, Di, nurture him." Yeah, thanks. "If I can keep him away from you, I might get lucky" I said. She grinned, she knew exactly what I meant. All she had to do was walk up to him and tower over him a bit, and he'd drop like a ripe peach. "Di, you just tell me who you're targeting, and I swear I'll stay off him." I looked up at her. "Promise?" "Cross my heart and hope to die", and she really did the actions too, just like a Girl Guide. Well, that's what I heard Girl Guides do, I was never a Girl Guide. If you've got the wits God gave you, you'll have realised that Diana the Valkyrie wouldn't join an organisation like that. Of course not! I was a Boy Scout, and great fun it was too, especially when we slept out under the stars. Or, in my case, didn't sleep. She might be the Cabin Mate from Hell, but she'd just saved my skin. Literally. So I decided to trust her, and I told her who I was going for. "Never!" she shrieked. I nodded. "You can't" she said in a tone of voice that carried right across the ship. "Shhh," I shushed. "Don't tell the whole world, Linda." "But how are you going to meet him?" "I already have" I said, smugly. "How, you're not even at his table!" "I went up on the bridge, and I impressed him with my use of a sextant." "A sex what?" "Tant". "What's a sex tant?" I looked up at those blue, blue eyes, innocent of geometry, let alone trigonometry, and wondered how to explain. I get myself caught in this trap all the time, usually with men who've been pretending they know all about something, and then suddenly reveal they can't even spell the words. And then they ask me to explain it to them, and I think about three-week courses on elementary mathematics being given to someone with the attention span of a distracted cartoon rabbit, and a horny rabbit at that, and I take refuge in the same answer again and again. "Valkyrie magic, Linda. It's a spell for finding out where you are." "Cool, you're a witch?" Uh, no. There's this religion called Wicca, and you really don't want to know any more than that. "No, I'm not a witch, but Valkyries can do magic too, you see. And one of the magics I can do, is use a sextant to find out where I am." "How does it work?" "Well, you work out the position of the sun ... " "Oh, like, astrology, right?". "Uh, yes. Astrology. Valkyrie magic." "Like wow, Di! Can you tell my fortune?" "No, but I can tell you where you are." "OK, where am I?" "Well, I need to use a sextant?" "Okay, go on." "The sextant is on the bridge." She stood up, her hair just brushing the ceiling of the dining room. I looked down - bare feet. I wonder what sacrifice I could make to the gods that would give me an extra sixteen inches? "Come on then, let's go to the bridge and you can show me this sex thing." "Er, Linda?" "What." "I'd rather not." "Oh, bottling out now?" "No, it's just, well, remember you promised? I don't really want the Captain to see you, do I? I mean, it'll make it a whole lot harder for me to tumble him if he's thinking about you all the time. She grinned. "Okay, a promise is a promise, I'll stay away from the Captain." I stood up and kissed her on the cheek, then went back to the cabin to change into something sexy that didn't look sexy, because if the bait looks too good to the fish, he isn't going to bite, is he? I mean, all the stupid ones got hooked and landed a long time ago. I knocked on the door to the bridge, and a three-striper let me in. "Hi, I'm Scotty." I bit back the obvious "Beam me aboard then" because you should never make jokes about people's names, on account of they've heard them *all* before. I went to the drawer where they kept the sextant, braced myself in position at the forrard of the bridge, and shot the sun. Then I worked the slider, got my fix, and plotted it on the chart. Meanwhile the captain watched me, admiringly; I guess I must have got it right again. "Thirty three North, Nine and a half West, just off Casablanca. Which is ... "and I looked around ... and pointed " ... over there." "Spot on Mrs Walker, well done." "Miss" "No, you hit it dead on." "No, I'm not a Mrs, I'm a Miss. But do please call me Diana." The captain gave me a nautical grin, and said "I see the sun is over the yard arm, care for a tot of rum?" So we went down to the Captain's Cabin, and I asked him what the meaning of "Sun over the yard arm" is, since what the sun was over depended on where you were standing. He said "It means I feel like a drink", and he wasn't kidding about the rum. "I suppose you've done a lot of seafaring, Miss Walker?" "Diana. No, mostly I fly to places, this is my first cruise." "Call me Steve. But you know your way around a sextant, you must have done a fair amount of sailing." Oh shit. Now usually in this situation, I can get out of it by relying on the fact that all knowledge and skill resides in the hands of men, and I mumble something about a boyfriend. "So how did you know that a light year is six trillion miles?" "Oh, I had a boyfriend into astronomy ..." and that gets me out of it. But having a boyfriend into sailing doesn't explain how come I can use a sextant, and oh *hell* there's no way out of this. Rats. Well, when you're cornered and there's no way out, might as well tell the truth. "Actually, Steve, The first time I used a sextant was yesterday." "But who taught you how to use it?" "Uh, no-one." "Then how ... ?" The Valkyrie Magic thing wasn't going to work here. Now that I've started in on the truth, I better tough it out. "Well, latitude, obviously the world is round, and the nearer you get to the equator, the higher the sun rises in the sky. So if you measure the angle between the sun and the horizon, simple trig tells you what your latitude is." "Yes, but you don't walk around with trig tables in your head, Diana." "No, but I've used a slide rule, and when I saw the slidey bits on the sextant, it was obvious that it was just another slide rule, except calibrated a bit differently. But it was pretty obvious what you had to do. Plus I had a fair idea where we were anyway, I mean, we had to be roughly off Portugal, so if I made a major mistake I'd soon know when the numbers came out wrong." "And the longitude?" "Well, I thought that was going to be really difficult, but then I remembered that there's 360 degrees in a circle and 24 hours in a day, so each hour sideways means 15 degrees, and when I found that it was forty minutes, that gave me ten degrees. I didn't even need to use the slidey bits for that. I'm using all the wrong words for this, aren't I?" Stevie was looking appalled. "So how did you know which way Casablanca was?" "Well, once I'd plotted our position on the chart, that told me the bearing for Casablanca, and something I learned in the Boy Scouts, is when you don't have a compass, you point the little hand of your watch at the sun, and halfway between that and 12 is South. So you don't really need a compass, and anyway I don't see how a compass could work in this great hunk of iron, unless it's a gyrocompass, so ... " I trailed off. He looked distinctly unhappy, and I think I know why. "You were in the Boy Scouts?" "Oh yes, much more fun than the Girl Guides." "Humph" he said, looking a bit glum. "Did I do it right?" I asked. "Oh yes. Oh yes" he said, bitterly. "Listen, Diana, I went through three years of hell to learn that stuff that you consider to be so obvious you can do it without having done it before, and now all these lads do is look up our position on the Navstar, and I tell the youngsters that you aren't a proper sea-dog until you can shoot the sun. I suppose you can shoot the stars, too?" "Er. I don't know. I guess you use your sextant on the Pole Star the same way you do in the sun?" He nodded. "And that's one of the stars in the Saucepan, right?" "Ursa Minor." "But I don't know which one." He cheered up. "I'm glad to hear there's something you can't handle, Diana." I thought a bit. "But it doesn't matter, all the others will be going in circles, I'd soon spot which one wasn't moving. Shut up Diana. You're shrivelling his ego, and you know that's bad. "Listen, Stevie." He turned to me, and I took his hands in mine. "You've got, what, a thousand staff on this ship? That's bigger than most companies are in total. You've got a couple of thousand passengers, and you have to look after all of them, you have to think about how this huge complex system works, you have to keep it running so smoothly that the passengers think they're in a hotel, and *that's* your skill, not working out where you are, that's nothing. Captaining the ship is your job, and you do it damned well!" And I kissed his hands. And he pulled me towards him and he kissed me. And one thing led to another, as is so often the case. Afterwards, he fell asleep. I know a lot of women think that's very rude, but I reckon I can't possibly have done a half-decent fuck if he's still awake after I've finished. So I slipped out of bed and down to the cabin and got ready for the afternoon sport, which was ... Netball! Well, they called it basketball, but when I played it at school, we called it netball, and I was *very* familiar with how to play, having played it for several months until that unfortunate incident with Jimmy Hartford which led to my being banned, even though it absolutely wasn't my fault, and he was walking quite well within a couple of months.