Everglades Challenge 2017: Spawn Looks Surprisingly Tidy

The thing I remember with any real fondness from calculus is the term "successive approximation."

I love this concept of basically figuring out your answer by taking a series of increasingly more accurate whacks at the problem.

How much volume fits under a particular curve?
​Start by estimating it as a triangle and then adding or subtracting little triangles until it's close enough for your purposes. 

Math = carpentry.

That's how progress has been on Spawn this year.  

​OH Rodgers, the boat designer, came up with a pair of sliding foils that lifted the bow of the boat last fall. They looked sporty and worked to make the boat a bit more stable and quicker.  

After a bit of testing, however, Mr. Linton pronounced, "The juice isn't worth the squeeze." Sadly for fans of the coolness, the foils took up a great deal of room in the cockpit, which tended to make the boat much less easy to row. 

For the Everglades Challenge, with its 300 miles of sailing and rowing and camping across oyster beds and what-not, the faster performance of the foil didn't quite outweigh the possible need to operate the sweeps. 

So the slots where the foils were inserted got filled back in and the rowing seat received a bit of an update.

New, higher, metal rowing seat (stowed for sailing).

For the first time, Team Spawn seems to be ready with plenty of time to spare. No last-minute deliveries or modifications! No questionable flight arrivals. No drama!  Knock wood.

With the bonus days, Captain TwoBeers turned his attention to organizing. In the famous last words of Joe Hill: "Don't mourn, organize."   

Fact: The quotation was actually from the next-to-the-last letter the labor organizer wrote before being shot by firing squad, and it goes like this: "Don't waste any time mourning. Organize."

In his last letter before execution, Hill asked that same friend, "Could you arrange to have my body hauled to the state line to be buried? I don't want to be found dead in Utah." Gallows humor is the bravest of them all.    

Where's the first-aid kit? Here.

All the important numbers.

Meanwhile, BookWorm (that's me) channeled an inner domestic goddess to cook up piles of beef jerky, chocolate-pecan bars, and meat rolls for the hearty sailors.  

I also hunted-gathered treats, including tiny individually-packaged espresso shots for Ninjee, and wee propane tanks for the JetBoil stove, and a supply of peanut M&Ms.

​Whether the team has time or interest in refueling themselves is a whole other issue, but they could. 

Extra bonus fact:
Successive approximation is also used in behavior modification; I knew someone who worked with emotionally disturbed kids. As part of their learning plan, teachers would reward  "approximately" appropriate behavior.

As I recall, one of her most challenging students was doing well when he managed to call her Miss F*&ing B@#%.

Baby steps. What I learned from stories about working with emotionally disturbed kids is that there is a whole world of people worse off in every way than it's possible to imagine. We are most of us really lucky.

​Knock wood.