Busy busy at Poynton

23rd & 24th September

We've made it to Poynton, and are now in the throes of getting both Sanity and the yard ready for the Open Day on Saturday. Lots of other Braidbar Owners are arriving to join us, so it looks like being a good weekend.

Yesterday's trip was pretty uneventful, though the Macc is well down up here, around four inches off, which is a lot for a canal that's pretty shallow at the best of times.

We'll be run off our feet, or else socializing, for the next few days, so I won't try to post anything until Monday. After that, there'll be more activity on the Building Sanity Again blog, I expect, but I'll keep folks posted about that next week.

Meanwhile, Nick Wilde calls me to account on the subject of the equinox (he's a master mariner, and knows about these things).

Here's what he said:

In the latest [blog] you put, "...since it is the equinox and the sun rises at six o' clock GMT, that is seven o' clock BST, it could be said to have been a crack of dawn ..."
Oops! Sorry Bruce, two mistakes there.

First: We are all supposed to have stopped using GMT when we changed to UT in 1972 (yes, really, that long ago!) - then the PC brigade changed British Summer Time to Daylight Saving Time, so 06:00 UT = 07:00 DST.

Second: The equinox doesn't mean that the sun rises at 06:00 - today it rose at 05:49 (05:46 in Macclesfield). I'm afraid that is common misconception. Equinox is a term used to describe the moment when the earth's tilt with respect to the sun is zero. In theory, at the equinox, a person at the equator should be able to observe the sun vertically overhead at noon. But that very rarely occurs. So, for somewhere up the Macclesfield Canal (or anywhere else for that matter) there are two (major) buggerance factors preventing sunrise from occurring 'bang on' 06:00. The first is latitude, the further north you are the earlier the sun rises - in summer that is. The other major factor is that we haven't quite got our earth to rotate in its annual orbit at a uniform yet. New Labour have promised that by the next election it will, however, I don't believe their hype. I prefer to continue to believe that which navigators have long believed, that we must also take account of the equation of time.

I replied:

I dunno, everyone's a critic ;-}}}

Thank you for reminding me about these matters so lucidly. I did actually realise that sunrise wouldn't be smack on 0600, but for the purposes of the argument I don't think the odd 10 or 15 minutes matters, this is canal boating, not circumnavigating the globe!

Similarly, whilst you are absolutely correct about the whole GMT/UT(C)/BST/DST thing, I'm not sure many of my readers would have understood modern usage, but you may well be right. I'll pop your observations into my next post, I think, and we'll see what response we get.

See you next week!