100th Post

To celebrate my 100th post I finally added these sweet ravelry progress bars.


In other news, I am 10 days into my 28 days of sea life. The past few days we have had lovely weather and things have been relatively quiet for me, except for the other night when I got a call out after I got out of the shower and was in my pajamas and everything. The MVP (moving vessel profiler) which is quite essential to the survey because it gives an accurate speed of sound at different water depths decided to stop commicating. So there I was on the after deck in my ducky pajamas, steel toed boots, bright orange coat and hard had working on this thing. I wish I had a picture of how ridiculous that must have looked. I have diagnosed the problem even though I have never worked on this thing in my life, and the manual for it is missing! I don't have the parts on board though so I am waiting until we go into a port next week to get them. In the meantime we are using the old school gear for sound velocity.



I have been getting some knitting time in the evenings on my Tidal Streams scarf by Ilga Leja. The yarn is Celestial Merino which was given to me by the lovely ninja. Sorry about the flash but it is hard to ger much natural light through a tiny porthole. There's lots of light up on the bridge, but I don't want to unleash all the crazy on the Captain right now. Being the girl on the crew is strange enough, but being the girl who takes pictures of knitted things would be going to far. Although, I would like to take a picture of a sock in progress once we get to Nain and challenge the Yarn Harlot to get a picture of her travelling sock there!

St. Anthony to Cartwright

Finally, things are starting get back to normal around here. We had a pretty rough start to the trip and had to stay in St. John's for a couple days to fix the ship up before we could sail. After getting away there was a bit of a leak in the Engine room and we had to go into St. Anthony Saturday to get things sorted out. St. Anthony is a cute little spot.

We spent yesterday steaming to Cartwright, Labrador where we will be working for the next few days. It was a bit windy and not very pleasant. I spent the morning curled up in my bunk feeling a little green. (I was not the only one) Today all is well and we are having nice weather as we run our lines off the coast of Cartwright.

The end of another long day

Julie2008 002, originally uploaded by leclerc_jk.

Close to Cape Spear, Newfoundland.

Lava Streams

One of the most stressful things about packing for any trip is deciding which projects to bring and then obsessing about it you have brought enough and if they are appropriate projects for where you are going, etc.   I may be a tad neurotic.  

I decided to do Tidal Streams by Ilga Leja.

It's nice stressfree knitting with an easily memorized pattern.  This stole is knit on the bias to give it lovely drap much like the Clapotis, while sounding less like a disease.  It's coming along so well I have also started a scarf version in Celestial Merino Dream - Aquarius , but I am leaving the ruffle out on this one to sea how it turns out.  

Along with the Scarf and stole I am bringing enough sock yarn for 4 pairs of socks and my Cleopatra wrap that is about half finished. I hope I don't run out. Maybe I will bring some extra dental floss in case I get desperate.

On of the nice things about July...

Hi-diddle-dee-dee a sailor's life for me...

On Wednesday morning I fly to Saint John's to join the CCGS Matthew for 4 thrilling weeks of playing Ship's Technician.  This is the part of my job that is exciting and terrifying all at once, and this time more so.  

I was hired 3 years ago into a type of apprenticeship/training program and now I am finally a full fledged Marine Electronics Technologist.  This means that I will now go to sea alone, whereas before I would go with a more experienced tech to work with me.  So this trip will be my first one alone and you really never know what kind of disaster any trip will bring.  As the ship's tech I am a department of one and have a variety of equipment to maintain.  Here are just a few:  Radar, gyrocompass, electronic charting systems, autopilot, radios, global marine distress system, AIS, global positioning systems, servers, networks, computers, navigation sounders, telephone systems, sound velocity profilers, multibeam echosounders, small boat electrical systems, deisel generators, and shotguns.  My offical job description is a 23 page document that says strange things like "work in isolation that leads to marriage breakdowns" and "working ashore with risk or being stranded and attacked by wild dog packs".

Sunday will be my last day off until August 14th so I am going to really enjoy knitting while sipping coffee and watching Coronation Street.

Have a good month everyone.

Why you shoud spend your birthday among knitters...

1. They will threaten to sing happy birthday to you and announce it to the world on the KOL blog.


2. Somebody will buy you a birthday cookie.

3. There will be cool cards...


...with stitch markers inside made by Val!


and a hand made coffee mug insulator made by Mrs. Happy .


Thanks to everybody for coming out.

ps- adding tequila to birthdays with knitters may yield entirely different results.