So we're back at Warsash now getting into the routine again. Easter was fantastic. Emily and I climbed Snowdon with a couple of friends and it was a great time to do it. There had been a few dumps of snow in the previous days so everything near the top was whiteout. Near the top the mist was thick and visibility was down below 50 feet. So, the ascent was slow near the top and if it had begun to snow we'd have to have turned around for safety. The descent was tricky when near the top as the snow was so compacted it was very slippery. If any of us had slid much we could have been off the edge - particularly as nothing was visible so you could easily have wandered off too far and lost it. Anyway, a few photos below.
It was gloriously sunny nearer the bottom, and at one point on the descent we could see the summit - something fairly rare on Snowdon.
Emily and I also managed to steal three days at the end of Easter to go to the Peak District. We stayed near a village/town called Mattlock and explored the surrounding areas with some walks. Most notably we climbed Kinder Scout, the mountain and highest peak there. It was only 633m so no Snowdon or anything, but it was trickier work as the ascent involves a long scramble up a lot of rocks. The views were fantastic and due to the great visibility I'd actually rate it better than Snowdon. It was slow coming down especially on the rocks, as they're much harder to descend than ascend. You have to be careful as one fall and you'd probably be very injured with not much chance of getting back down. Anyway, we were fine and enjoyed it a lot. Unfortunately I don't have the photos of that yet as the films haven't been developed.
Incidentally, I entered the modern era of photography this week, as Emily and I bought a Nikon Digital SLR. I've watched a couple of sunsets with this already, and been able to take many more pictures than with my Pentax on film. I would have paid £40 in just developing by now for what I've taken in two days! I'll still use the Pentax though, as film rocks.
Here's a few of the first photos below. (LOW RES OF COURSE SO PLEASE IGNORE THE BAD GRADIENTS - HIGH RES LOOK FANTASTIC!)
Hope you like those. (You should be able to click on them to make them bigger so you can see them properly).
So I guess I should probably tell you what I've been up to this week. We've started two new modules: Engineering Drawing, and Marine Legislation and Management. So far in the latter, we've just talked about life at sea, but soon we're going to begin the important part; learning lots of rules about what we can and can't do at sea. This is a vital part of keeping your job at sea - knowing what rules and regulations apply where. Get it wrong and you could end up losing your job, in prison or dead (worst case scenario). It's supposed to be boring, so we just have to learn it. Final exam will just be a memory test as far as I'm aware. The coursework will involve more research. We've only had two sessions of engineering drawing, so we've not done much yet, but below are a couple of photos of what I have done so far. (Not perfect by any means). Lots of circles to draw with a compass!
Finally, we've just had the last two days of our Fault Finding course in electronics. We had the test today - a circuit with a fault and less than five minutes to find it. Almost everyone passed and it took us less than a minute each to find the fault, so we were all happy with that. Real life will not be so easy, but as far as we understand, we probably won't be relied upon for such expertise on ship. They'll leave it to someone who knows what they're doing I expect!
No comments:
Post a Comment