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Editor’s Log: Drifting Away Again...

By Kat Tanaka

In previous months I’ve mentioned the dinghy without explaining much about what it is. In this case, it's the inflatable hard-bottomed boat that connects S/V Ulysses with land, the way that the Space Shuttle or the Soyuz connects the International Space Station with Earth. When I was first getting practice with the dinghy in preparation for solo handling, the captain attempted to reassure me by noting that it should be easier to manage than a car—I wouldn’t have to worry about staying within lines, and it's okay to nudge other dinghies aside and bump into them when maneuvering at the dock. Sound easy? After all, it's the “hitting other cars” part that makes parallel parking so fraught, right?

Regulating steering and speed and forward/reverse all with one hand is somewhere beyond “pat head/rub tummy” as an exercise in coordination. Surely it wasn’t that complicated learning to look and steer and accelerate and decelerate and shift gears in a car. Perhaps it’s just that I had years of experience as a passenger, so I knew more going into the process of learning to drive. Being neither an astronaut, an aerospace engineer, or much of a physicist, I’ve been finding the managing of vectors and inertia on a boat to be more of a challenge than teenaged driving ever was. At least cars truly stop! They don't drift much, either.

I’ll be thinking of those docking maneuvers in space with much more appreciation while I get more hours of practice with the mercifully soft-sided dinghy. The proper name for a small boat that performs ship to shore duties is a “tender”, and perhaps I’ll feel that way about it eventually.