Oh, blimy - will it never end :-)!?
What's the point of our getting all bent outta shape and insisting on "metric" when it has no relevance to coastal cruising let alone serious seafaring? Porlier is 6 hours away, and I gotta get there in time to hit the slack. Porlier Pass is 15 minutes long on the slack, 5 minutes long on a fair tide and interminable on a foul tide. I don't care how many
cables (or metres) it is.
I'm perfectly capable of laying TrentePieds dead in the
water six inches off the bullrail on the hammerhead or a foot if that be my intent. But 6 millimetres, or even six centimetres? Forget it! Why would I even try?
Oh, and KVB: Note our little ship's name "TrentePieds", because that is what she is. Would it have sounded silly to call 'er "9.144" :-)? And don't let me get started on Old French Measures and the miseries wrought by the "Age of Reason" and the French Revolution!
Given our bottom contours where I sail, with the odd half-tide rock lurking about, I like to keep half a mile off the shore at all times, but 804.762 metres? Forget it! I know what halfamile looks like across the
water. I don't give a hoot what 804.762 metres look like.
Like I said a coupla hunnert posts ago: I use an APPROPRIATE measurement system for what I want to do. I know what a cable length look like across the water. I don't give a hoot what a metre looks like. I loathe multi-digit numbers! I know that a fathom - wonder of wonders - is the precise distance twixt the tip of my middle finger on my right hand and the ditto on my left when I stretch my arms out. And my lead line tells me that it really appreciates that! What need have I for a newfangled
depth sounder when TrentePieds only sticks down as far as I am tall, and my sounding lead is ever handy in my
cockpit. What need have I for a
compass rose marked in "new degrees" - 400 to the circle - when neither TrentePieds nor I can hold a course to an accuracy of half-a-point on a mariner's
compass?
Now, when I'm building liggle choo-choo trains, a wonderful thing to be doing in the off-season, then I have REAL problems of mensuration! After all, in the scale I work (1:87.1 or 3.5mm = 1 FOOT!), the
engine driver stands fully 825 thou tall. Thasright. we measure in "thous" (1/1,000") because while the (male)
engine driver is 825 thou (21mm) tall, the lovely lady that bids you welcome aboard is all of 725 thou(18.5mm) tall, and careful differentiation is called for! "Thous" work better than mm.s because you can think and work in whole units unimpeded by decimal fractions. Again it is a matter of APPROPRIATENESS.
Sheets of
plywood for building people-sized stuff ashore are 96 inches (= 8 feet) long, and so are
sheets of what Yanks call "sheet rock", because 8 feet is the conventional finished floor to ceiling height in modern dwelling houses in NA, and the sheets can be bought in 10 foot lengths, (i.e. 3,048mm) because that is the conventional finished floor to ceiling height in
commercial premises. Now, I can look at a room and know instantly how many sheets of "sheet rock" it requires, because the number is small and convenient. There is no way in Hades that I could now, or ever could have when I lived in
Europe, go into a room and know instantly how many square millimetres of sheet rock I would need. That is because millimetres, despite the dimension stamped in millimetres on the corner of the sheet goods, are INAPPROPRIATE for the purpose at hand.
Now as for you, Ann ;-0)! - well of course you went back to the "imperial system". The foot plate of your
sewing machine will have marks marked in inches. And your old Pffaf prolly did too, cos so many of them were
sold this side of the pond. Berninas have "metric" markings, but who cares? A 1/4" seam is as close to a 5mm seam as "dammit" is to swearing, and unless your are like the little girl with a curl in the middle of 'er fore'ead, you can't control the run of the
fabric to an accuracy of a millimtre anyway :-)! Tabling
sails, whether you use a 2 inch tabling or a 5cm one makes zip difference. Ditto for a 4" v. a 10 cm tabling.
So when you get down to brass tacks the only thing that matters is that you use a convenient, APPROPRIATE unit of mensuration.
Peace :-)!
TrentePieds