Stood at the harbour wall this morning and did something I've done perhaps ten thousand times. Looked at the water. Read the conditions. Force 3 from the northeast, slight confused swell from two directions — a remnant from yesterday's weather running into today's — pressure dropping, cloud building in the upper quadrant in the particular way that means rain before evening. Took about four seconds. Completely automatic. Completely accurate. Completely pointless. There's no ship. There hasn't been for nearly a year. No crew to brief, no harbour master to call, no passage plan to adjust. I stood there with forty-six years of accumulated weather knowledge and nowhere to put it, which is, I'll admit, a situation I hadn't anticipated when I handed in my certificate. The skill itself is not a small thing. Reading weather off water is not something you learn from a book. You learn it the way you learn anything that actually matters — through consequences. I got it ...
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