Santa Cruz to San Diego 02
Log 16oct02
The VHF radio crackles to life just before sunset.
'This is Frontier control calling the vessel at North 34 tack 40.8 by West 120 tack 43.5'
I check my coordinates and verify that this isn't me. I'm south and east of that position by about 16 nautical miles.
'Frontier Control this is Pacific Orion'
'Pacific Orion go channel 6 alpha for Frontier control'
'Pacific Orion going 06'
I switch the VHF radio to channel 6, intrigued by what this is all about.
'Frontier Control this is Pacific Orion'
'...Yes Pacific Orion, this is Frontier Control, you are in safety zone 4 which is currently closed. We have an event happening at 19:00. I'm going to have to ask you to move 4 miles to the north or 4 miles to the south until the event is over'
'Roger Frontier control, how will I know when I can cross zone 4?'
'Sir, we have a single event scheduled for 19:00. It will be quite visible and when it is over you may proceed through zone 4.'
Now I'm really intrigued. I deduce that Frontier Control is Vandenberg Air Force base's marine vessel traffic control and that they'll be firing a missile at 7:00 pm. It is now 6:30 pm and getting dark quickly.
What a day its been. I left Santa Cruz on Saturday and it is now Monday evening. 'Kattituade' has been shadowing me since I passed them in Monterey. They've been harbor hoping down the coast while I've spent the nights off shore. They're about 12 miles behind me now, (right on the edge of zone 4) and we're headed for Santa Barbara. My ETA should be about 3:00 am and it's going to be a long haul because the wind is getting erratic as I've passed Point Conception and the wind is 'cwocking' and 'madawating' ('Weather Ralph' in Toronto) around to my nose. I've been flying my sails wing to wing for the past two days and soon I'll have to take them down and turn on the engine. I'm not happy about that because the dang auto pilot is giving me problems in spite of the $250 bucks I spent in Santa Cruz rushing it to Raytheon to get it's little chipmunk brain tweaked. I've changed it's name from 'Ray' to 'Sybil' because I've come to realize it's psychotic and is trying to kill me.
As I rounded Point Conception I had some whales messing with me again. This time it was two grays who charged at the boat. They sounded about 8 feet away from my forward port quarter and I have no idea how they managed to slide under me without grazing the keels. I had seen a school of them frolicking and feeding just off of Point Conception. They'd come up from a dive and hold their heads out of the water with water gushing through their baleen filters, then slide back down. A big male and his sidekick went by me a few times at about 50 yards. I kept a respectable distance and then these guys decided to take a closer look at me. In hindsight it was a great show.
At 19:05 I notice a meteor rising out of the hills North of me.
It starts like any other 4th of July fireworks show. Just an orange bright sparkly meteor except it's rising up into the sky. Arcing out over the Point and above me in the Channel. I suspect that it's just some kind of defense missile as it burns it's solid rocket fuel booster. It'll probably die out and splash 100 miles out in the water, a ship will pick it up and they'll take it's own little chipmunk brain back to the lab and analyze the numbers.
At about the apogee of it's trajectory, the point where it's pretty much horizontal to the ground, it's solid propellants consumed, it should stop spewing out it's fiery red and orange smoke, loose it's fight against gravity and start falling back down to earth.
'Into the distance, a ribbon of black,
Stretched to the point of no turning back,
A flight of fancy on a windswept field,
Standing alone, my senses real,
A fatal attraction is holding me fast,
How can I escape it's irresistible grasp?
Can't keep my eyes from the circling sky.
I'm tongue tied and twisted,
Just an earth bound misfit'.
-Pink Floyd, 'Learning to Fly'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn4_zur5hjw
At the point where I figured the show was over, a faint white light suddenly grows in intensity from the middle of this thing, issuing out an expanding white aura that grows in size and intensity. It looks like a huge sperm cell with a transparent head and long dark tail stretching all the way back to the ground. The glowing vapor blob grows and elongates along it's trajectory. The white light gets brighter and brighter until it turns a beautiful greenish blue and the rocket seems to take a left turn and recede away from my line of sight (very fast given the telemetry math I'm trying to fathom in my head) and gradually fade away as it arcs over the horizon. The thing must have been so high up that the halo and tail and greenish-blue cloud glowed in the dark sky for about an hour from the sun beyond the horizon.
I read in the Santa Barbara paper the next day that what I had seen was a $100 million 'Sky Wars' test. The rocket that I saw flew to up 140 miles and over the South Pacific. It was shot down by another rocket launched from the area of the Marshall Islands. A high altitude balloon was also launched to try to fool the 'killer' missile but it managed to find it's intended target and the test was deemed a success.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_phenomena
http://www.spacearchive.info/vafbview.htm
