Pitching and Rolling

We just landing in Sydney this morning (Thursday). We sailed within a few hundred yards of the front of the Sydney opera house at 5:30am. We were awake to see it because we could hear the activity of the crew.

Yesterday was the roughest seas we have had yet. We learned about various ship motions.

When the ship rotates back and forth from side to side, it is called rolling. This is the motion that usually causes seas sickness.

The ship can also move up in the front while down in the back, then reverse the two. This is called pitching. We had 35 mile per hour winds yesterday, and we pitched. The nose of the ship would rise up many feet (20 or so?), then slam back down onto the water, sometimes splashing onto our 6th deck balcony. Gentle pitching and rolling can be soothing during a night’s sleep, but pitching to a level that slams our section of the ship back down onto the seas is not relaxing.

This movement made it interesting to stand up from a chair. If you picked the wrong part of the cycle, you felt so heavy that your legs almost could not lift your body. When you picked the other extreme in the cycle, you almost felt like you were going to thrust your whole body into the air, lifting your feet from the ground.

There is a third motion possibility, where the nose of the ship also move right and left. This is called yawing. (sp?) It is normally associated with both rolling and pitching. As the front of the ship lifts upwards, the ship also rollings to the right. This causes the nose of the ship to thrust to the right when it then falls. That means that the next cycle when the front of the ship rises, the roll is to the left, so on the next drop of the nose, the nose also yaws to the left. If you try to make this combination of movements with your hand, it will look like a hula dancer. Fortunately, we have not experienced this one yet.

We have a tour of the opera house scheduled for this morning, then will tour the city.