Don & Kully's World Cruise on Viking Neptune

We began the day celebrating our friends, Mark and Tricia Wells’ 42d wedding anniversary with a Mimosa toast at breakfast. The Wells are from Ocean Springs, Mississippi and have become great friends over the past four months. Happy Anniversary!

Today we visited the place on earth referred to as “Null Island”. This place isn’t an actual land mass, but a weather buoy named the Soul buoy (after soul music) located in international waters at zero-degrees latitude and zero-degrees longitude, where the prime meridian and the equator intersect.

“Null Island” started as a joke in the geospatial community that is used in electronic mapping systems to trap errors. Such errors arise, for example, where an image artifact is erroneously associated to the location by software which cannot attribute a geo-position, and instead associates a latitude and longitude of Null, Null or 0.0. In other words, kind of an electronic waste basket.

The physical location of Null Island is roughly 370 miles off the coast of West Africa in the Gulf of Guinea. The nearest island is a small islet 354 miles to the north that is part of Ghana. The nearest point of the mainland of Africa is Achowa Point between Aksidaa and Dixcove in Ghana. The depth of the water is 16,210 feet.

We arrived at the Null Island location late in the afternoon and spent roughly an hour circling coordinate 0.0 latitude and 0.0 longitude in search of the Soul buoy. Bear in mind that the buoy is anchored in over 16,000 feet of water, so it normally drifts one to two nautical miles around the physical anchor point. Unfortunately, we were unable to locate the buoy. Our sister ship, the Viking Sky, was here two days ago and was also unable to locate the buoy. The Captain reported that the weather service has not received a transmission from the buoy in over 45 days, so he suspects the buoy has either come loose or sunk.

This is the fourth time we have crossed the equator on this Voyage. If you read our blog post on January 20, we talked about crossing the equator and being initiated into the Order of the Shellbacks. Well, when one crosses the equator at 0 degrees north and 0 degrees east you become a member of the “Emerald Shellbacks”

We have three more sea days before we arrive at our next port of call in Dakar, Senegal on Sunday, April 21.