Day 17 Atlantic Crossing

We have 400 miles to go and made another 150 miles of progress towards our destination today. Forecast still looks very consistant and good for an arrival on early Sat. If that happens we’ll slow down the last night but I’ve learned it’s best not to slow down until you’re sure you’ll make your desired window. It’s a lot easier to slow down than to speed up.

Today we saw another sailboat on the ocean. It came up pretty fast and passed us doing about 10 knots. Square top mainsail, racing numbers on the sails and the red and white graphics on the side made it clear it was a race boat. No need trying to chase after them.

When you start getting close to your destination on a long passage anticipation builds and creates a strong desire to be done. The closest emotion I can relate it to is wanting to open presents on Christmas eve as a child. For me it’s an uncomfortable emotion and I just want it to be over but nothing you can do about it.

The other thing that happens as you get closer to shore is you start planning the projects for when you get to your destination. We’ve got our normal share of things to do but might need to get the boat hauled. We have to decide on monday if we want to haul the boat then or wait until after we have guests. We’ll call an audible mon morning after we check out the boatyard and see what’s possible.

Thanks for all your comments. Makes it easier to keep up the daily (b)log posts. I was hoping to do that this passage since it’s longer and I though it would help me be more introspective about things and it has. The other big benefit is that it fires up my nuerons and helps me stay awake.

One last thing, I’ve read yet another book that uses the singularity and a significant character in a book. Dan Brown – Origins. I’ve enjoyed all these AI characters but they don’t develop the tech in these books. With all the talk of AI since we’ve been on the boat I feel like I’d like to read some more stuff about it to help ground me on what’s really happening. I had a course is AI in grad school (1991) and know a little about Neural Nets, Expert Systems, Case Based Reasoning etc but something seems to be happening that has brought these and other technologies to the verge of something profound. Is it just computing power or are there new novel approaches to AI? Any good recommendations on state of the art AI tech trends that’s approachable and helpful to a layman technologist?

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