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interested in them. They anchored for the night and in the morning continued on, through the Galliard Cut and over to the Pedro Miguel Locks. They were lowered to Miraflores Lake and the Miraflores Locks, where they went down farther to sea level. The lock gates were opened and whoosh, they were in the Pacific Ocean.
    We hit the two-year mark. Can’t believe it’s been that long and this much fun . So now the real excitement begins; the biggest and longest passage of our trip is about to happen, 3,800 miles to the Marquesas. A boat our size should average 100 miles a day, taking into account the lighter winds near the equator. The doldrums. Thirty-eight days and nights is a looooong time with two kids in 47 feet. I’ve had the kids memorize parts of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” a ritual for the equator crossing.
    — The Sleavins, March 1995 
     
    The average person who previously took no notice of longitude and latitude is now familiar with expressing locality in degrees and minutes and seconds because of the popularity of the global positioning satellite system for the car and even personal wristbands. When you reach your destination with the aid of your GPS, you don’t really care how far you are from the equator or Greenwich, England, but in fact, that is just what those numbers denote. The latitude is the angular distance of a point north or south of the equator (zero degrees latitude), and the longitude is the angular distance of a point east or west of Greenwich, which is referred to as the Prime Meridian (zero degrees longitude). All the lines of latitude running from the equator to the North and South poles are parallel to one another and equal in distance. One degree of latitude is equal to sixty nautical miles. The lines of longitude run perpendicular to the lines of latitude and are referred to as meridians. They are not equal in distance, but get closer together toward the poles, where they converge.
    At sea, the accuracy of those coordinates can mean survival or not, especially in the South Pacific Ocean, with hundreds and even thousands of square miles of water between land-masses. The early sailors developed navigation skills by observing the patterns of the waves and the blueprints of the skies during their voyaging adventures. Later came the active use of celestial navigation in exploration; ships could determine their latitude by tracking the sun’s position throughout the day, and the North Star or the Southern Cross by night.
    With instruments that were the precursors to the sextant, the sailors’ knowledge of their location in a north or south direction became even more accurate. Nevertheless, until well into the eighteenth century there were shipwrecks and lost crews by the multitude, because there was no reliable way to determine longitude. After John Harrison, an English watch-maker, solved the problem with his marine chronometer, Britannia ruled the waves, and the rest, as they say, is history. With the current satellite-dependent technology, such as GPS, it is almost impossible to miss an island completely or, conversely, to run smack onto a coral reef or into a rocky coastline.
    Notwithstanding the ease of knowing just where you are in a vast ocean these days, reaching the latitude of 00 degrees, 00 minutes, 00 seconds is still as celebrated as it was in the old seafaring tradition. 
    Those who have never crossed the equator at sea are termed “pollywogs,” and must undergo initiation rituals in order to enter the domain of Neptunus Rex. Any crew members who have made the transition are termed trusty “shellbacks,” and can ask the ’wogs to perform whatever elaborate ceremonial rites suit them. Judy was the only shellback as the Melinda Lee crossed the equator; years before, when she had completed high school, she spent a Semester at Sea set up by the Institute for Shipboard Education.
    Judy insisted that her three pollywogs dye their hair red, paste on temporary tattoos,