One-Eyed Man Blog
By David W. Robinson, Seattle, Washington: Tech writer for The Man, civil libertarian, Germanist, Joycean, geek.

This is what Jan and I did on Monday 20 May, when I took some needed time off from the Salt Mines: We faced down the fearsome lock keepers and sailed S.V. Eleanor into Salt Water. The interactive “slippy” map below shows our route and some points of interest. We started from the mouth of the ship canal at Shilshole Bay and made it almost across Puget Sound before turning back.

You can view the map in a larger window.  The track was captured on my Android phone using the OSMTracker app. I used GPSPrune to clean up the data and generate the graphs and other images shown further on. The map implementation in Javascript combines elements from the OpenLayers wiki and from Harry Woods’s site.

The trip started off calmly enough.

Outbound leg, Shilshole to an area about equidistant from Pt. Monroe (Bainbridge Island) in the south and the shores of the Suqumaish Reservation (Kitsap Peninsula) to the north. The geo-captured part (in green) is 3.44 miles with an average speed of 2.43 mph.

On the way back, things started out calm and got calmer — for a while.

Return leg. The geo-captured part (in green) is 3.91 miles with an average speed of 3.81mph.

Then the wind became bizarre.

Strange doings at Lat. 47.714336 Lon. -122.449659. The southerly wind drops to nothing, then restarts as a northerly wind, and I end up going around in a circle in an accidental jibe before realizing what has happened. I really think I should turn this squiggle into an avatar.

The end was fun but slightly alarming.

This part was fast, in a broad reach bouncing along with following seas at an average of 5.8 m.p.h. Noisy GPS data notwithstanding, our top speed appears to have been 13 m.p.h. We covered this distance in 23 minutes, arriving back at Shilsole 15 minutes earlier than expected.

What was that all about?

This is weather station WPOW1 (West Point), plainly visible at the tip of Discovery Park. This weather-beaten location is pretty close to where we were.

NOAA records show how the wind speed suddenly shot up at 5 p.m. The change is highlighted in red. Perhaps we should have paid attention to the plummeting barometric pressure, shown on the green plot.

Meanwhile, NOAA also reported that the wind direction turned around 180 degrees in the space of a few minutes, as we can confirm. The reversal is highlighted in red.