the transit!

Well, my big ambition on this trip (besides making enough to pay for it with blackjack) was a spectacularly fulfilled!  We saw the transit of Venus – but only by  a hair.I carried the Questar (a small suitcase-sized box, about 25 pounds) to dinner and then upstairs to the Sky deck.  It was more than an hour before the transit of Venus.  Conditions had to be nearly perfect.   The transit would begin less than an hour before sunset.  (The event would be seven hours long, but that didn't do us any good.)Sky conditions were miserable.  It had rained during dinner and was still almost completely clouded up,  just a little patch of blue here and there.  But I wandered around the Sky deck, through puddles of rainwater nearly an inch deep, and found a solid protrusion where I could position the telescope with a view to the west.  The sun wasn't visible, but I focused on the farthest horizon and waited.  Then the patches of blue filled up with cloud.  I didn't quit, but I did pack up the telescope and go down to the promenade bar to join Gardner and Sue.  With about twenty minutes to go, it was still socked in.  But you could see some sunlight filtering in to the west, through layers of cloud.  I went back up to the place I'd found and set up again.  And at the very last moment, less than ten minutes before actual sunset, a glimmer broke through and I could glimpse the sun!   Only about half of the orange disk was visible, floating in billowing clouds, but superimposed on it was the hard dark circle of the planet – much bigger and more dramatic than I had imagined.  We could see it off and on for about five minutes, and then it crawled dramatically to its demise, with the crisp outline of palm trees and luxury homes in front of the fiery disk.  During the whole thing I was holding the Questar solar filter in my right hand, but the light was so attenuated I didn't need it.  The sun was about as bright as a moderate neon light at maximum.  (Don't Try This At Home note:  You don't want to stare at the magnified image of the sun even when it has been dimmed by clouds – the ultraviolet light is still being collected and magnified, and can burn your retina.   Under these conditions I judged the risk minimal.  I checked several times, and the sun was invisible with the filter.)  No blackjack in port, so I played a game of Scrabble with the women, and lost for lack of genius, or perhaps a surfeit of blah tiles.  At 9:30 Gay and I went down to the theater and watched an amusing comedian, who had a somewhat moderated Rickles-style routine, improvising riffs on the audience's home towns and ethnicity and assumed sexual shortcomings.  Oh, earlier in the day . . . Gay and I left the ship and walked around town.  I'm sort of looking for a couple of souvenirs, a good fountain pen and a distinctive notebook for the next novel, but so far no luck.  We had a good lunch at an upstairs joint; no atmosphere, but nice jerked chicken and fried fish and the peculiar warm coleslaw typical of the island.  Went to a bar and had a beer while local salty characters did a good imitation of drunks in a bar.  After lunch we joined Gardner and Sue and Frank and Susan for a somewhat cramped taxicab tour of the island.  Pretty houses and gorgeous beaches, which would have been more beautiful if the sun was out.  Midway we stopped at a picturesque bar where I got a bottle of delicious ginger beer, very sharp and sparkly.  But a two-hour tour would have been better than three hours and fifteen minutes.  In a cab.Today I'd planned to do some drawing and/or painting, but it looks like it may rain all day.  That's okay, though – I got my glimpse of Venus, and that should hold me for the next century or so.Joe