(skip down to the photo galleries at the bottom)
I have assumed sailors knew when they were approaching land by the sea birds circling over, trying to grasp onto the mast, or diving off the starboard beam and coming up with a flying fish. But we saw them even when we were just 10 days out, somewhere in that vast, expansive middle.
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Water. |  |
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The best watch was the 6am to 9. Midnight to 3 was long, but peaceful, and the stars kept company, shifting towards the Southern hemisphere as we made our steady descent down the latitudes. The day shifts were easy but lacked solitude, and the evening shifts were taken up with the preperation of dinner, the eating of dinner, the cleaning of dinner, and the talking after dinner. This often led into the 9 to midnight shift, but never long into it, and so as the weight of the food in your stomach pulled down your eyelids, you would fight to keep watch of the wind instruments, the GPS, and the horizon. It was the 6 to 9 that I looked forward to, coming about for each of us once every five days. Its when the world shows off, rotating fast enough to bring the night sky and new moon from full dark, to breaking light, and the red sun finally gets around it all and rises up.
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All that and you are still alone. |
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In the 18 days across from the Canaries, we saw four boats, one of them, inexplicably, in all the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean, managed to be exactly on our course. In the middle of the night and no one to respond to our calls over the VHF - an auto-pilot left unattended. We barely shifted course in time to avoid it.
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The most stressfull pasage was in Gibraltar. The radar was covered with ships, and me alone, on the midnight to 3, taking us a few degrees North, then a few degrees South to work through them.
It wasn't until we arrived in the Canaries that our capitan realized out masthead light lacked the red and green navigational lights that it is meant to have. We'd gone through the Meditteranian, and one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world with lights showing we were not much more than a buoy.
The Med was cold. I slept in my clothes, and the huddled in my sleeping bag on my night watches. The Med was rough. We had incredible winds, and huge waves, as if Italy couldn't wait to be rid of us... we pitched and rolled, and all learned the new ways of walking so popular on the high seas, the lurch, the stumble, the "hope that didn't hurt", the "no, really, don't walk with scissors", the high-sea strutble.
The Atlantic was mercifully warm. Then hot. Calm. Yet full of constant, steady wind. For some 700 nautical miles we had a single run without ever changing tack... our course set on 261 degrees, straight for Trinidad. Full sail. The trade winds are that perfect.
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We never had a squall. We barely saw rain. The sea stayed calm, the skies clear, and the horizon never faltered. 24 days and it always managed to be a perfect line.
And there is a lot of water out there... Try to think of all the land you have ever seen. Every millimeter of land you have ever gazed upon, stretch it all out as far as it would reach... And that is barely a fraction of how much ocean there is. Then remember that you've only seen the surface, the top one hundredth of an inch.
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The nearness of death was incomprehensible. The proximity, yet unimaginable reality of it, right there. Stay on the boat: live. Fall off: die. Even on a clear, calm day, something the size of a fender would dissapear from view in 10 minutes... imagine on a moonless night. With the new moon the evenings were absolutely stark pitch black. There was nothing beyond a small light radius from the boat to be seen.
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Sunrise, sunset, pitch, roll, read, drink, clean, cook, chess, shower, bask, stretch, push-ups, stories, ideas, theories, horizons, dolphins, fishing, books, jokes, lewd jokes, sailor jokes, knots, lines, sails, wind, water, sleep.
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Patience. Quiet. |
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Land. Tobago is the North island of the Trinidad and Tobago island nation. On the evening of the 17th day, Tobago was the first land we saw. We came around the South of it, surfing an incredible current in the G? Straight, the lights of the towns lighting up the sky, and the incredible, rich, fertile, green smell of land led us onwards. We may as well have been floating towards it. Our nostrils turned up, eyes closed, feet barely moving.
Waking up the next morning to the sounds of thousands of birds in the rainforest above the tiny harbor we had fumbled into in the dark. The boat not rocking at all, but still! I had not noticied until then that I had been completely without stillness for nearly three weeks. I jumped out of bed, the sun about to rise, I listened, inhaled deeply, studied the forest, some locals came by in a fishing boat, all smiles, good mornings, and welcomes.
The last dinner the crew of the SV Discovery had together was, fittingly, Italian. 4300 nautical miles, and 28 days away from Italy.
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:::back:::