Masts and Sails of a Barque Mystery Cache

NOTE: This cache is 1 of 16 associated with the Ol' Salty Dog's Maritime Mixer cache series.

Find your way to the physical cache container at the coordinates revealed by solving the puzzle below. In the physical cache container, attached to the log, you will find a "puzzle piece" that will get you one step closer to finding Ol' Salty Dog's Maritime Mixer.

The term barque refers to a type of sailing vessel with three or more masts having a particular type of sail-plan, with fore-and-aft sails on the aftermost mast and square sails on all other masts. Barques were the workhorse of the golden age of sail in the mid-19th century.

The advantage of these vessels is that they can utilize a smaller crew and use fewer of the labor-intensive square sails than a comparable full-rigged ship, which make it less expensive to operate. Another advantage is that a barque can outperform a schooner or barkentine, and is both easier to handle and better at going to windward than a full-rigged ship. While a full-rigged ship is the best runner available, and while fore-and-aft rigged vessels are the best at going to windward, the barque is often the best compromise and combines the best elements of these two.

The tall ship Eagle is a three-masted sailing barque with 21,350 square feet of sail, homeported at the Coast Guard Academy, New London, Connecticut. It is the only operational commissioned sailing vessel in the U.S. maritime services. Seventh in a line of cutters to bear its name, the Eagle was built in 1936 by Blohm and Voss in Hamburg, Germany, as a training vessel for German naval cadets.

It was taken as a war prize in 1946, commissioned into Coast Guard service as the Eagle, and sailed from Bremerhaven, Germany, to New London, Connecticut. The Eagle serves as a seagoing classroom for approximately 175 cadets and instructors from the academy. On the Eagle, cadets apply the navigation, engineering, and other skills they develop in classes at the academy.

Eagle's hull is built of steel, four-tenths of an inch thick. It has two full-length steel decks with a platform deck below and a raised forecastle and quarterdeck. The weatherdecks are 3-inch-thick teak over steel. When at home, the Eagle is moored at the Fort Trumbull State Park on the Thames River.

A sail provides propulsive force via a combination of lift and drag, depending on its angle of attack, its angle with respect to the apparent wind. Apparent wind is the air velocity experienced on the moving vessel and is the combined effect of the true wind velocity with the velocity of the sailing vessel. Angle of attack is often constrained by the sailing vessel's orientation to the wind.

Sails may be attached to a mast, boom, or other spar, or may be attached to a wire that is suspended by a mast. They are typically raised by a line, called a halyard, and their angle with respect to the wind is usually controlled by a line, called a sheet. In use, they may be designed to be curved in both directions along their surface, often as a result of their curved edges. Battens may be used to extend the trailing edge of a sail beyond the line of its attachment points.

An array of sails use wind power to propel the barque Eagle when it is underway at sea. Utilize your sleuthing skills and match each listed sail designation (annotated as A through J) with the correct sail indicated by number on the image below in order to determine the correct number to assign to each missing decimal minute digit of this puzzle cache's coordinates.