Math Problems in Singapore

Or: How and why I wasted five hours and seventeen dollars tracking his stupid boat.

This screenshot cost me seventeen dollars.

FleetMon seems to be the best in the business when it comes to vessel-tracking. And boy, do they know how to fish-hook their market with tantalizing promises of the even more up-to-date tracking, suggesting that its current estimate of of arrival of the CMA CGM Puccini to be perhaps not fourteen hours from now.

Newer position available via satellite AIS! Get a one-time position report here! Upgrade to our Unlimited Sat plans to see all ships by satellite.

Hook line and sinker.

Thank you, FleetMon. Yes, I will spend 15 credits on a one-time update, even though I can only buy 100 credits at once. Incidentally, I also appreciate your revenue and advertising team’s choice to not post the same poignant ads that you can see on other ship-tracking companies such as the ones on Vessel Finder (Number 1 Reason Men Pull Away, what women are doing wrong?’)!

Do you accept paypal?

A travel blog is an indulgent beast. I worry that in order to avoid the cliché of expressing something earnest and new, I will err on the side of banal.

But it’s my last day of traveling solo before I meet my ocean-crossing, aviophobic travel partner and I’d like to establish an independent lens with which to view the spaces and the situations I encounter.

I’m not sure where to start, which is why I’m beginning with painting the absurd reality of my current situation — squinting at my laptop in the 4am quiet of my darkened dorm room of one of Singapore’s ‘most recommended hostels on TripAdvisor!’ taking in the following equation:

Do you remember in high school math class when you had to read one of those paragraph problems with absurd scenarios? The skill was in deciphering which numbers need to be put into a specific equation. Do you remember thinking that you’d never need to use these skills in real life?

The The given scenario offered in on the Boat Safe’s Nautical Know How doesn’t exactly pertain to today’s current situation, but I’ll go ahead and say that this is probably the closest I’ll ever come to being the subject in a hypothetical math problem. While I am not the kind of person who is concerned if my yacht will reach the marina in time for the dinner reservation, I am suddenly incredibly invested in learning how to calculate an estimated time of arrival.

How to estimate a time of arrival: brought to you by Boat Safe!

The scenario

A few minor adjustments…

Assume that despite modernity, there are still people out there who are willing to pay top dollar for the old-world experience of dropping off the face of the earth for eleven days.

Despite your having paid seventeen dollars to have access to the the recent satellite’s ping to the ship, it turns out that the cheapskate website has failed to update its ETA based on current *conditions*. Assume that you have not seen your partner in 125 days, and you are uncertain when said partner’s ship will arrive at the port in Singapore.

The knowns

Adjustments:

• The ship is putting along at glacial pace of 16 kn.
• At 14:56 EST the Boat was 194 nautical miles away

The unknowns

• Approximately what time should you shave your legs and change out of your sweat-soaked, shapeless, Gellhorn-inspired-linen and into something that shows off the fact that you lost nearly 3 pounds in water weight while also hiding your pork-like, sunburnt flesh earned from your ten mile hike in blazing equatorial sun?

The Equation

This is a simple Distance, Time, Speed question. The formulas to use for the calculations are made simple if you remember, and actually write in a corner of your chart, the following diagram.

The “D” represents distance, “S” represents speed and “T” represents time. In order to solve a distance, speed, time problem you need two of the three values and then must solve for the third.

Using the diagram, cover the unknown value with your finger and what you have left is the formula to solve the problem.

In our problem we know the distance and the speed so we cover up the “T” and the resulting formula is “D” over “S” or “D” divided by “S”.

Using this formula, the first step is to calculate how long it will take your stupid boyfriend to get to the port by cruising at 16 knots for 194 nautical miles.

Show your work

194 / 16= 12.25 hours

Note: This is not 12 hours and 25 minutes, it is 12 hours and 25 hundredths of an hour. We now have to convert this decimal to minutes by multiplying .25 X 60.

.25 X 60 = 15 minutes — So…our trip will take 12 hours and 15 minutes.

Now that we know how long the trip will take, we simply need to add that time from the time of broadcast, and then convert it to Singapore time!

1500+1215= 3:15 EST

Fuck it, I’m just going to use a converter.

If you would like to learn more about Time, Distance, Speed calculations or other aspects of navigation, check out our Nautical Know How Coastal Navigation Course.

Here’s another math problem. Given that I woke up at 4:00 am and it’s now 10:00 am, and that Garth’s ship hypothetically will arrive at 4:30 pm, why is it that I’ve wasted my remaining me-time writing a banal blog entry (damn, I knew it would happen!) on the self-induced torture of calculating the precise arrival time of a boat?!

Perhaps I enjoy the surreality (it’s a word) of the whole affair. I’m now sitting at a wooden table in The Hive’s buzzing common room area, listening to strange club music playing on loop — Is that Basil Poledouri being sampled? — drinking instant ‘White Coffee’ which well-complements the free peanut-butter toast, anxiously doing math problems. It is a scenario which I would never be able to pen down out of my own imagination and one I’d like to remember.

If he was arriving by plane — if everything was a given, I’d probably just get on with my day and engage with the world much as I had done every other day. I would say hello to the people who have since populated the common room: a Vietnamese family with a little baby, a handful of European backpackers and random old dudes casually snoozing on the couches while their phones charge.

It’s the damned dependence on the known-variables which compels me to obsess. I the illusion of control over something which is as changing as, hah, the sea. Or maybe I just want to justify the seventeen paypal dollars I spent in a moment of bleary-eyed weakness.

If I were transported back to the time where a seawife wasn’t ever to know when the ship would arrive, would I feel just as tied up in knots as the arrival week drew near? How many evenings and mornings would be spent gazing at the horizon for that Maltese Flag?

Whatever, I don’t even care.

I’m going outside to brave the humidity. I’m not some kind of freighter wench who will spend her last remaining hours of solo-travel freedom squinting at her screen. I’d rather be doing something much more independent and edgy, clearly devastated that I’ll be seeing him again.