Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Darkness and Light -- Indian Ocean Passage -- Part 4

There is a rhythm to our days at sea, driven in part by our watch schedules, in part by longer-lived natural phenomena.  With just the two of us on board, we divide the day into 6 watches of 4 hours each.  I have a hard time sleeping in the daylight, so Jennifer takes the 6pm-10pm and 2am-6am watches, alternating likewise during the day.  I have the single night watch, and it's there I note another major rhythm of a life at sea:  the 28-day progression of the moon through its phases, from full to waning to new to waxing, and then all over again.  This 28 day cycle is so timeless and powerful that it even seems linked to the human reproductive cycle, to harvests, and to the bloom of coral polyps in tropical reefs, relationships that leave me keenly aware that however much science has taught us, there remain deep mysteries in our universe.   The moon is new as we sail these waters, so the nights are pitch black, a dark so profound that I cannot even make out what I know to be the white spume of our wake, not 2 feet distant, as we part the waters with our hulls and rudders.  It's as if we sit in a dark closet in a dark room in a dark house. 

Or a deep cave.  Years ago, our family went caving in West Virginia - we engaged the head of the local spelunking society who took us to a cave he was just beginning to map out.  We drove to a church parking lot in a remote town, walked a few hundred yards to a tree in a field, donned our gear, and disappeared into a hole in the ground.  It was one of the more disorienting experiences of my life, and after stooping, crawling, and wading for an hour or so, headlights on and senses on full alert, we arrived in a moderately-sized cavern from which several tunnels diverged.  Our guide asked us to turn our headlights off, and we were thrust into darkness as I've never experienced. It took a conscious effort to remain calm, and only by reminding myself that no one was moving could I ease my fear of being left behind to find my own way out of the cave.  Our guide then demonstrated something that still leaves me mystified:  he gave us each a tiny candy, a breath mint, and asked us to chew it with our mouths open … a request to which, being entirely at his command, we immediately complied.  Amazingly, we each saw each other's mouths fill with sparkling glints of light, a kind of oral light show.  Later, he described the chemical phenomenon at play, a description that regrettably, I cannot call to mind even as the memory of those flashing lights remains vivid -- more for the darkness it implied than the magic of the chemistry.  How dark does it have to be to see breath mints emanate light?

Last night, in passing over watch responsibilities to Jennifer at 2 am, I turned off all the lights on the boat (we usually keep a light on inside for reading, etc.), and, as we careened through the steadily-building seas at a brisk 7.5 knots, beckoned her outside and together we turned our eyes toward the east, to the invisible churning sea behind us. Below us, in the wake of our tiny vessel, we watched a surreal scene of flashing blobs of light, some nearly a foot in diameter, each pulsing for a few seconds, each appearing and disappearing.  Readers of this blog may recall a prior posting on this phenomenon of bioluminescence, when an algae bloom in a Marquesan bay created a pointillist masterpiece of white drops of light, as we pulled our dripping dinghy oars through and across the water, each drip precipitating a speck of light that would appear and disappear in an instant.  More commonly, flecks of bioluminescence, excited by the passing of our hull through the water, often fill our wake with tiny blinks of light, like diamonds glinting.  But what Jennifer and I saw last night was markedly different than any display we've ever seen, and called to mind the startling scene in Avatar, where a  character is running across the jungle, and as its feet strike the ground, the ground bursts into light and then fades as the foot's impact wears off.  Last night's scene also reminded me of the science fiction film convention to use visibly pulsing auras of light to denote a higher intelligence, the water astern perhaps teeming with latent wisdom, brought into visible being by our boat's movement.

The lights we saw in our wake last night would first appear some perhaps 10 meters behind our boat, as if on a bizarre time delay switch … the boat passes, the light-generating material gathers its photons, and then, seconds later - a lifetime in these kinds of phenomena - it amasses enough energy to burst into a globe of light, pulsing circles and spheres, streaming lines of light, some measuring a foot in diameter or length, and glowing for several seconds before fading back into black.  Our wake, otherwise invisible in the black night of a new moon, was suddenly filled with these balls and streams of cool soft bluish-green light, materializing and fading continuously, a sort of moving punctuation point on our progress through the water. The glowballs cannot have been the product of a single creature; rather, microscopic bits of plankton must be firing off photons sympathetically to those in the immediate vicinity, a kind of collective behavior, if it can be called that.  We were left awestruck. We stood mesmerized by this unfolding display of nature's whimsical diversity - what evolutionary advantage could possibly obtain to this synchronized phenomenon? 

By the following morning, it seemed like we might have dreamed the entire event, were it not for each other's corroborative description.  Attribution to a dream is easier at sea, because one of the other interesting consequences of our 4-on, 4-off watch schedule is that we frequently find ourselves roused in the middle of a vivid dream, waking to the unwelcome sound of the alarm.  More often than not, one or the other of us will stagger into the main salon, having just woken, with a fantastically-detailed and improbable story or snippet of a dream. Our sleep comes in stages, and normally, the body awakes during a dream-free stage, but our watch schedules disrupt this normal pattern, and we often try and figure out the Freudian explanation for this or that dream.  But the glowing blobs were no dream, and I feel fortunate to have witnessed them as we sail this vast ocean.

After a few days of respite from the winds and the waves, days we spent cleaning the boat from its accumulated layers of salt, tidying up below, and enjoying a slam-free existence, the winds and waves are back, gathering strength.  The winds are blowing a steady 25-30 knots, the seas as confused as ever, and we've again reduced sail to a sliver of a genoa.  It's early Wednesday morning here in the Indian Ocean; the 600 foot long Pantanassa, a ship bound for Vishakhapatnam, India, is just past abeam,  and even though it passed us less than 2 miles away, it was disappearing behind the large deepening swells every 10 seconds or so.  I called him on the VHF, just to see if we were visible on his radar, and in a clipped Indian-British accent, he cheerfully informed me that he had nothing on his radar.  So much for our radar reflector, and thus the reason we stand watches even in these desolate latitudes.  We see a ship a day or so, it turns out … we're crossing or sailing alongside several shipping routes from the Cape of Good Hope to India, Singapore, Korea, and China.  As they say, a collision at sea can ruin your entire day, so we keep watch at nights, checking radar every half hour or so, peering above the cabin roof for lights, checking the chartplotter for AIS signals.  Mostly, we just sit amidst the impenetrable darkness of a moonless sky.

The sun also brings its own rhythm to our days; we try and keep our local time synched to the relevant time zone.  Strangely, Cocos Keeling established a 30 minute offset from the customary Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) +/- 'whole hour' format, so when it was 9 am in Bali, it was 7:30 am in Cocos Keeling.   It's hard enough tracking what time it is in DC and Denver, where our kids live, without having to add or subtract the 30 minutes … for some reason, Cocos time is the same as Rangoon, which also has adopted the 30 minute offset. On a passage, it works out to moving our clocks back an hour every 7 or 8 days. By the time we get to Mauritius, we will be GMT +4, so our mental math will be easier.  Since we crossed the Date Line many moons ago, we've been "catching up" to our kids … making it successively easier to connect via satellite phone, a call we make each Sunday, adding a weekly upbeat to the rhythm of our passage calendar. 

Governed in one way or another by these rhythms - watch schedules, lunar precessions, sunrise and sunset, time zone differences, our days take on a repetitive and languid rhythm of their own.  Jennifer gets her best sleep from 6 am to 10am, during which I fix myself breakfast and my daily dose of coffee; after she gets up and has some breakfast, we undertake the normal daily chores of a passage - any requisite sail changes, any repairs, some general clean up, etc.  The rest of the day we're both awake, reading, talking, listening to music, playing my guitar, and, conditions permitting, enjoying the sun and breeze and the schussing of our boat down and across the mostly following seas.  I usually end up cooking dinner as Jennifer naps prior to assuming the first night watch, and then the night passes in a series of radar checks, snacks, and the sleepily-turned pages of a book.  We're cooped up to be sure, on a small boat on a big ocean, but we have come to feel cozy, even when the weather keeps us inside for days on end.  This has been a long passage - just short of two weeks as I write this - and we each are looking forward to landfall and the unbroken sleep afforded by a secure anchorage.

This trip has taken a bit of a toll on us each - with an initial extended period of rough weather, mercifully broken by a few days of easier going, and now followed by a second, hopefully-shorter period of challenging sea and wind conditions.  We've also received several bits of sad news concerning the passing of friends, news which has left us shaken, again reminded of how far we are from many of the people that are closest to us. These reminders of mortality, our inability to share in the grief of their loved ones, and the often rough weather, have combined to make this a passage with an above-average dose of melancholy, even as we look forward to seeing other friends, Keith and Geert, join us in Mauritius for the sail across to South Africa.

Despite the crew's funk over the weather, the sad news, and the distance from friends in need, our boat has fared well; our decisions to keep her under-canvassed has cost us a bit of time, but has spared the boat and ourselves of the otherwise ensuing mechanical and emotional stresses.  "Go slow to go fast" is an adage I've often repeated to my business colleagues, and that seems to be the case here.  Another favorite adage of mine, "it's a marathon, not a sprint," also seems appropriate.

And after this passage, I might coin another adage, appropriate to those who move quickly through life, leaving friends behind, perhaps unaware of their importance:  "Look for the lights behind you."  The image of those glowing lights bobbing in the waters behind our boat is an image I will hold onto forever, each now representing a friend or loved one I left behind as we set sail around the world.  Some of those lights fell dark on this trip; I will miss them dearly.  Others will appear anew, as we sail onward, making more friends, but each light lost dims the world. 

Looking well ahead, to when we resume our shore lives, perhaps one of the insights gained on this voyage of the body and soul is that we need to check and see whether we create spheres of light as we move through our busy lives, and whether we tend to their fragile luminosity.   In this, we are spurred by the bright memory of those mysterious glowballs flashing and fading away in the dark seas, again reminded of the many unknowable mysteries on this big blue ball we call home.  For who dares to ignore these moments of water-borne magic, an ocean's unexpected display of nature's whimsy, the lights that glimmer and gleam behind each of us?

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Log Book -- Indian Ocean Passage -- Part 3

Early this morning, Saturday, the weather gave up its six and one-half day temper tantrum, and the winds and seas began to ease. Like any tantrum's return to normalcy, this recovery came in fits and starts, shoulders shaking, brief respites, diminishing cries and accusations. By sunrise, the winds calmed to a steady 20 knots or so, and the rolling white-capped swells that kept our cockpit continuously soaked with salty spray, and our decks skittering with flapping, washed-up flying fish, had settled down to a rumpled seascape.

Everything seems ready for a rest. The weather has been brisk and not dangerous in any sense - but it's fair to say that a near week of strong trade winds can challenge even the best boat and crew. Years ago, Joshua Slocum, in his legendary solo circumnavigation upon the tiny Spray, described these waters and winds as "rugged," an appellation that Beth Leonard, herself an experienced circumnavigator, relates in the context of Slocum's famous tendency to understatement. Of these waters, Slocum goes on to write, in his classic Sailing Alone Around the World: "I naturally tired of the never-ending motion of the sea, and above all, of the wetting I got whenever I showed myself on deck."

It was a tiring week for us as well, and we too missed the ability to be on deck, or, at worst, to keep the doors to our salon open. Direct sunshine and fresh, dry breezes do wonders for confined spirits on a small boat, and by last night, as the "books read" pile continued to grow, Jennifer and I confessed to each other our deepening desire to move on to the next part of our voyage. Of course the easing winds will call for sail changes, and perhaps slower speeds, but we hope to continue to make good progress neither too lean nor too fat, Jack Spratt!

Reviewing our ship's log, I confirmed the steadiness of the wind since last Saturday at around 2:00 pm, when it picked up to 30.3 knots and, then, continuously blowing hard until this Saturday morning at about 2:00 am. Over that 6 ∏ day period, as recorded in our log book at four-hour intervals coinciding with the changing of the watch, the wind speed hovered near-continuously between 24 and 28 knots, with only one or two brief variances. The log book is a fixture on any vessel, being the legal record of the boat's sea time, and it stands as the official record of any passage. Ours is a sturdy book of numbered pages, with each two-page facing spread hand-divided into a series of columns to record the vital statistics of our passages: date and time; latitude and longitude; course and speed over ground; barometric pressure; battery level; true wind direction and speed; and swell direction and height. On some trips, we also record the ocean temperature, to better understand currents.

We measure course over ground (COG), as opposed to what our compass reads, because the waves, winds and currents slip a boat sideways, so that we are often pointed in one direction, but, viewed from above, the boat moves at another, at an angle to our compass heading. We only care where we're going, net of this slippage, not where we're headed, thus the "over ground" element to course, as opposed to compass heading of the bow.. Likewise, we measure speed over ground (SOG) for the same reason; our speed through the water is interesting since it represents the impact of the water on the boat, but the water itself might be moving, like a canoe in a current, so we want to know how fast, net of current, we are moving along our COG. We also leave a small space for comments, but our log is not designed to be a diary of passing events. Instead, we record sail changes, mechanical issues, and short descriptors of the sea state. Looking back over the past week, I see frequent references to "bumpy," "confused," and "same same," that ubiquitous Vietnamese expression we picked up during our travels there earlier this year.

Our log, written in pencil which neither runs nor fades, began on April 25, 2008, when Jennifer took delivery of ile de Grace at its port of origin, La Rochelle, France, on the Bay of Biscay. From there, I can use the log to track her progress as she and three professional crew, including a very experienced captain, Larry Trow, sailed first to La Corona, Spain, then to the Azores and Bermuda, and then to our home port of Annapolis, MD, arriving June 4, 2008. On her maiden voyage, she sailed 4,360 miles over 32 days excluding rest stops and layovers. That's just about twice the distance from Cocos to Mauritius, a trip we now expect will take about 16 or 17 days - in each case, the boat averaged about 5.6 knots, consistent with our working assumption in estimating voyage times. There is a ritualistic component to updating our log, its carefully inscribed entries recording a new snapshot every four hours. Another line of data, another 20-30 miles of westing; a two-page facing spread is four days, another 500 miles. This passage we will add an additional 4-5 pages to our log, which already numbers 139 filled-in pages.

In reviewing our log entries for various passages we've made on this circumnavigation, my mind's eye can still fill in the blanks, recreating periods of dirge-like calms and the occasional adrenaline surges of a squally night or an untimely gear failure. Read carefully, logs re-create a journey, a fact that seemed to come as a surprise to a few unscrupulous sailors who have sought to fabricate transoceanic voyages through spurious entries into a fictitious log, only to have their stories fall apart upon close ex poste examination of their log books. One of the more famous of these occurred in the first solo sailing race around the world, when the log book of one of the participants was revealed to have been crafted to put forth the appearance of steady circumnavigational progress while he drifted, alone and apparently going mad, in the South Atlantic Ocean. His boat was found adrift, his so-called logbook on the navigator's table, and his body was never recovered.

Unlike land travel, with its movement along and past fixed objects - roads, cities, rivers, mountains -- moving across the earth's oceans is done with little reference to any recallable object. There are no buoys at sea, and no guideposts. The sailor and land traveler each have ports of call to be sure, but the sailor's time between ports lacks any unique, enduring reference points. For all intents and purposes, it's impossible to single out this set of swells, or those kinds of waves from any other set on any other part of any other ocean, so the sailor's journey becomes one of port-based transient experiences and sights. I used to take pictures of the sea on certain days, or weather conditions - a delirious sunset, an ominous funnel cloud or an especially dark and well-defined squall line - but the pictures, viewed years later, seemed hopelessly generic, useless in helping to recall a place and time, a state of mind, a perspective.

Conversely, a picture of a sunset along the highway from Boston to Providence immediately recalls to my mind the sense of possibility I felt at the time, headed to another college weekend of beach parties followed by a surreptitious night sleeping on Second Beach in Newport. Or the image, captured on a cheap camera, of the Rocky Mountains, appearing suddenly in our windshield, as my still-long-time close friend Mark and I crested the pass on Interstate 70, near the end of our December-January road trip from Pittsburgh - we were exhausted and exhilarated at the same time, and it was my first close-up glimpse of the mighty mountain range. The uniqueness of landscape - as opposed to the relative sameness of seascape - seems to facilitate a detailed association between place and feeling, associations nearly impossible for the blue water voyaging sailor.

Featureless but for its swells and waves, a vast flat plain of blue, its horizon painting a perfect circle with one's boat at its perfect center, the passing seascape of a vessel's voyage is, ultimately, defined simply and solely by the entries in the vessel's log book. From these figures -- wind speed, direction, swell, pressure, sea temperature -- I can faithfully recreate the visual attributes of any point along the voyage, but these attributes span a very limited range of possibilities. Choppy, swelly, calm, confused, etc. Unlike the breadth of landscape attributes, the narrow range of seascape attributes seem insufficient to re-create or trigger in the armchair traveler the mood, feeling, emotion, or state of mind attached to any single point on any particular passage. In the best of times, with all manner of mnemonic devices, my memory is shaky at best; recalling states of mind is a particular challenge, even passages as recent as our Bali to Cocos trip. It's as if my memory is erased shortly after arriving in a port, unable to recall the passage, the tape spliced to excise any recollections, my life and mind having taken a apparent hiatus of sorts for the periods between ports.

Hence, this post and the several preceding posts, an effort to capture the ineffable and otherwise un-recallable experiences of the passage portions of our circumnavigation. For our ports, I have the pictures of the people we've met, the places we've visited, the islands we've seen; jogged by these geographic specifics, I can recall the wonder of stepping on a deserted Tongan island, or the sense of accomplishment I felt arriving in Cairns, our Pacific crossing complete. For our passages, the figures in our log are necessary, but, for me, insufficient. It's hard to remember how I felt reaching the halfway point on our crossing to the Marquesas, or the quiet satisfaction of turning south, into the lee of Niue after a rough few days in fresh-gale conditions, or the sense of anxiety felt when, hove to the wind, I felt the massive swells slide underneath our tiny vessel just a few days ago.

I know myself well enough that these faint memories of passages will fade quickly, and I need more than my logbook to bring them back. To parse a cliché, our logbook might serve as the proof, but these words and essays are the pudding. As much as I love data, and it's been a struggle to resist the temptation to graph our boat speed as a function of wind strength, or to undertake a time series analysis of the relation between wind strength and swell height, I do know that it's memories I treasure and not facts. Put another way, well after we finish this journey, when it comes to the record of this circumnavigation, what will matter most will not be our boat log, but this web log. Dessert anyone?

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Discretion -- Indian Ocean Passage -- Part 2

Saturday came the rains, Sunday the confused seas, but by Monday the wind and seas calmed sufficiently for me to jump overboard and clear the tangled fishing line from the port propeller. The boat dipped and rose in the 8 foot swells, but the lack of wind waves atop the swells made it possible for me, tethered to the boat with a harness, to swim underneath the hull and cut the line free. It took about 30 minutes, with repeated dives to avoid being clonked on the head by the hull or engine. This is the third time we've inadvertently run over our own fishing line, and as Jennifer pointed out, "We just don't get it, do we?" We're working on a checklist approach to reefing that has, as Steps 1 through 5, "Bring in the fishing lines." In the interim, as a kind of self-imposed punishment, I'm no longer fishing.

That day, on our reassuring daily radio net with our friends on Second Wind and Pylades, we heard the forecast for the next few days, courtesy of Second Wind and its owner's son's regular weather updates from his Stateside location. I quote: "Tuesday afternoon - large choppy seas, winds ESE at 21-28 knots." You could have set your instruments and clocks by this bit of news. The next day, at noon, the winds picked up to the high 20s, and the seas moved from the rinse cycle to the spin cycle. Coming from every which way, east to southwest, the seas loomed higher by the hour as they combined their crests and troughs; we quickly reduced sail so that we were at the prescribed configuration: a triple-reefed main, and a 30% genoa. We began to skim over the wave tops, with a cresting wave every few minutes dowsing our cabin top with hundreds of gallons of sea water, or slapping our topsides with a bang and a crash.

The forecast indicated a gradual organizing of the swell pattern, even as the wave heights were projected to increase to 4.5 meters ... this is the distance from trough to peak, so, visually and viscerally, we were looking at - and sailing across - 30 foot walls of moving ocean, a relentless rippling of energy. Jennifer and I have each experienced these kinds of seas, but only on a monohull, with its heavily-weighted keel serving as a righting moment when the seas threaten to lay the boat on its side, and every additional degree of heel diminishing the sail area presented to the wind. Together, these forces -- the weight below the boat, with its righting force increasing as the boat heels (think about those tall blow-up punching toys you might have used as a kid, that are weighted on the bottom, and how they always -- improbably -- come up for another punch), combined with the disappearing sail area, as the sail approaches the horizontal - create a very stable platform for sailing - willows in the wind as it were, bending but breaking. In fact, there are hundreds of well-documented and even filmed cases where a monohull is "knocked down," laid flat onto the sea, and, relying on the force of gravity, as the keel seeks equilibrium, the boat lifts back up, however groggily, not too worse for the wear. Not something to seek out, to be sure, but I'm just saying ∑

Neither of us has had much catamaran experience in these wind and sea conditions, although, Lord knows, we've read enough accounts and heard enough stories to know that the one thing to avoid is to have too much sail up, since there is no forgiveness on a cat. More oak than willow, cats either sail upright or lay fatally awash in the seas. Without a deep keel, with its underwater counterweight (tons of lead in most monohulls), a wayward gust or wave can push the cat sideways to a tipping point of no return, and just like that, the trip is over. Against this factual background, we became a bit anxious as we gauged the response of now-triple-reefed ile de Grace to the large and choppy seas and brisk winds coming across our port beam. We reassured ourselves that we were sailing her by the book, with the sails at their recommended settings, designed to balance safety with speed.

And fly along we did, although the pitching and yawing of our rectangular floating raft was sometimes fearsome to behold. We are accustomed to relatively level surfaces when we sail our boat; its design promotes this, with two hulls astride a central platform. I can't remember a time when a coffee cup, placed on our cabin table, wouldn't still be there hours later, even in some of our roughest seas. For the most part, the wind and sea conditions on that Tuesday permitted this kind of casual placement, something inconceivable to monohull sailors whose boats, in these kinds of conditions, sail at a perpetual 30-50 degree angle to level. On their boats, every movement is an exercise in leveraged motion, and each utensil, book, and dish is wedged or secured against an often-elaborate arrangement of positioning and locking devices.

But by nightfall, with the seas continuing to gather strength and the winds picking up to the high 20s and low 30s, the normally serene interior of ile de Grace resembled that of our monohull sisters, with cups and dishes stowed away, and the usually-level interior surfaces emptied of anything that might slide. We found ourselves moving from handhold to handhold in the cabin - going outside was neither necessary (given our interior instrumentation and 360 degree visibility) nor especially enjoyable. Our monohull friends will smile perhaps incredulously as they read our surprise at having to hold on while moving about, but truth be told, it's an uncommon experience for a cat owner.

Catamarans also differ from monohulls in their reaction to crossing waves, waves that approach from the side. While both kinds of boats are vulnerable to the "sideslap," when a cresting wave slams against the side of the hull, a catamaran is also vulnerable to the "underslap-innerslap combo," as the wave passes underneath one hull, slams against the bottom of the bridging cabin, and then, as often as not, slams against the inside of the downswell hull before passing underneath and into the distance. The seas on Tuesday were sufficiently disorganized and large that we were experiencing the characteristic "combo" every few minutes or so. For those not used to it, the sound and sensation leads one to conclude that the boat has just struck a large and immoveable submerged object ... a sensation that is extremely disconcerting even if you know it's "normal."

Through that night, into Wednesday morning, both Jennifer and I harbored a growing fear that sailing "by the book" might, in fact, be too aggressive for these particular sea conditions. As we heeled downswell and downwind, sliding down a swell, our stomachs would occasionally churn, our muscles tense involuntarily, as we waited to feel the boat right itself. Combo slaps became the rule. I should note that the shallow design of cats in fact can work to its favor in these conditions, as they tend to slip and slide across and down the wave, unable to grip or pivot. It's a surfboard without a fin.

Were cats to have deeper keels, the hulls would, in fact, lock into the water, with the topsides and sails then able to tumble sideways, leading to a knockdown, from which cats, unlike monos, cannot survive. For monohulls, the keels do lock in, but the combination of weight and reduced sail away inhibit the tendency to be knocked down, and even if knocked down, monos will right themselves. For cats, they'd rather slide than tip, for the most part. Using a car analogy, monohulls resemble Subaru Outbacks, and cats are more like Ford Expeditions; both have four-wheel drive and purport to handle slippery conditions, but the driving experiences are extremely different.

Given this slipping tendency, we were not without intellectual recourse as we sought to calm ourselves during the evening's more gut-wrenching slides and slaps, and the accompanying sensations of heeling over uncontrollably. However, it's fair to say that in these kinds of situations, the limbic system takes precedence over any kind of intellectualization, and we spent the night in a state of palpable concern.

So through the night we fretted, and through the night we raced down and across invisible seas, making excellent time to our still-distant destination of Mauritius. There's a spirited debate among ocean sailors whether sailing through rough weather is scarier at night, when you can't see the approaching waves, or in the day, when their size and occasional fury is all too evident. I come down squarely on neither side of the debate, and would rather sail in calm seas, all things being equal. By mid-morning, after our daily check-in with our sailing companions, we decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and while heartened by our significant progress over the previous 24 hours, we doused the mainsail completely.

This required us to turn the boat into the wind, using our engines, and reducing our speed to a crawl, just enough to keep the boat pointed into the wind. The loss of forward movement allowed us to appreciate the magnitude of the seas around us ... standing atop our cabin, ready to furl the main, my eyes were a good 15 feet above the water line as each successive swell approached, and our boat lay in the windless lee of the trough, I would lift my eyes sharply and see a near-vertical 30 foot wall of water moving toward us. Just as it felt we wouldn't make it over, our boat would rise up the leading edge of the swell, pause briefly on its crest, and then slide gently down its backside. As the boat hung atop each passing peak, I could see all around me swell upon swell, a sweeping procession of triangular ridges, one after the other, south to north, carriers of invisible energy and unimaginable volumes of clear deep blue water.

Experience allowed me to appreciate the seeming contradiction between the almost-serene motion of these swells, and their awesome embedded power, strong enough, in the "right" conditions, to take a multi-ton boat or ship and slap it silly, drive it down, and turn it upside down. I knew these swells were more talk than action, lacking as they did any serious cresting waves. As surfers and sailors know, the water doesn't really move as the swell passes ... a cork will remain relatively stationary as the swell passes underneath. Thus, swells without cresting waves pose little danger to a well-designed boat, be it sail or power, monohull or catamaran. On the other hand, if the waves are cresting, the swell propels a wall of moving water that can drown surfers or capsize even the sturdiest vessel. These were large swells, but, in their essence, harmless. Not the grizzlies of the far southern oceans, whose dangerous wind-swept cresting seas blow horizontal plumes of smoke-like sea water across the decks of ships and boats foolish or brave enough to sail those waters. These were more like circus bears, large and capable of mischief, but usually harmless. Usually.

We are happy to have dropped the main, proceeding, as we have for the last 24 hours, on a tiny scarf of a genoa. Our speed over ground has dropped a bit, so we'll be at sea a bit longer than if we had continued to tempt fate, the seas, and our constitutions, but it's not a race. We slept easier last night, and in a drowsy state of almost wakefulness, I thought I heard our tiny boat whispering "Bless you - I was getting tired of all that slapping" ... or was that Jennifer ... or was that me giving thanks?

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Memory -- Indian Ocean Passage -- Part 1

We left Cocos Keeling around lunchtime on a Thursday, a leisurely morning spent mailing a package containing the now-replaced watermaker pump back to the dealer in Brisbane and some last minute internet connections. The sky was clear, the water turquoise, and we weighed anchor at the same time as our Irish friends, Fergus and Kay, slipped their anchor on their hand-built 39 foot steel sloop Pylades. The Alaskan boat, Second Wind, would soon follow after some last minute repairs to their autopilot. We eased out of the coral lagoon, raised sails, and turned north and then west to Mauritius, 2300 nautical miles across the Indian Ocean. The winds were less than we expected, as were the seas, and we debated increasing our sail area to maximize our speed, but decided to leave things be, against the possibility of winds freshening.

By evening, with Pylades well ahead of us, and Second Wind passing us to port, we re-considered our sail deployment, and shook a reef out of the wind, accelerating slightly in the evening breeze as a full moon rose behind us into a clear, star-filled sky. A delightfully low-key beginning to our longest two-person passage yet. Earlier in our circumnavigation, we had sailed the 3000 or so miles from Galapagos to the Marquesas, but then we had the pleasure of my brother Stephen and his wife Guita for company. No matter how much sailing you've done, passages take a toll on the mind and body, and the toll is eased with additional crew to share the watches and provide each other company and respite from the relentless wind, wave, and sky. Having a quiet first night on this long two-person passage was a blessing. The following day - Friday -- was more of the same: light winds, calm seas, and gentle sailing.

On Friday night, I had my normal 10pm to 2am watch, and, as is our custom, turned the radar on every half hour or so to check for ships and approaching weather. Our boat is equipped with something called AIS - Automatic Identification System - which receives location and course/speed information from transmitting vessels, said vessels to include, by maritime law, all cargo ships over a minimum length. Unfortunately, we discovered in Indonesia that many Indonesian vessels had yet to comply with the law, so we've gotten into the habit of trusting our AIS but verifying with our radar. That night, I was surprised to see a few rain clouds off to the southwest, headed our way. As readers may recall, rain has been a rare visitor to ile de Grace these past months, so I welcomed the short spritz of rain that evening.

For me, passages are something between a leap of faith into an unknown ocean, with unknown weather and sea conditions, and a competing belief that we'll just pick up where we left off on the prior passage, sailing in the same weather and sea conditions of the just-completed passage, no matter the interlude between the two passages. I suppose it's a reflection of my short attention span but I somehow assume, emotionally, that the wind, wave, and weather patterns of the prior passage will simply re-materialize on the current passage, even as I know, logically, that this is at best unlikely. It's as if my memory holds time in abeyance during the period my boat is in port - as if somehow the sea and sky outside the refuge go into freeze frame, unable to click to a new screen. Hence the decision to leave Cocos under-canvassed - after all, we came into this lovely atoll in stiff winds and strong seas, and surely, the weather would not have eased in the interim, would it?

Satuday morning, after the evening shower, I awoke to my 6am-10am watch and saw banks of clouds across the south and western horizons, and soon, the clouds darkened, swollen with rain and scuttling toward us, a harbinger of a windy and squally day. The winds began to pick up, from their 10-15 knot range of the prior day to 15-20 knots, and then, accompanied by driving rain, to 20-25 knots. We decided to practice a maneuver known as 'heaving-to,' whereby the sails and rudder of a boat are arranged so as to result in the boat bobbing quietly in the gathering seas, moving ever so gradually backward in the water so as to leave a smooth slick of water between the boat and the oncoming waves. It's the safest way to ride out heavy weather, and the combination of sail and rudder is different for each boat, so, with over 2000 rugged miles of ocean ahead of us, we thought it'd be good to practice. To our chagrin, we had another of those moments where the golfing practice of "mulligans" would have come in handy; we left our fishing line out, and, inevitably, it wrapped around our prop, leaving us reluctant to use the engines until we sorted things out down there. Of course the very conditions that led us to try the heaving-to maneuver, and, in our thoughtless haste, the line wrapping maneuver - gathering winds and seas - made it just about impossible for me to jump over the side and cut the line free. So we cut short our practice session, dropped our main to reflect winds that were now blowing 25-30 knots, and turned back on course.

For the rest of the day, we huddled inside, sheltered from the driving wind and rain. The seas were building steadily, and soon we were sliding up and down and across 12-15 foot waves, trough to peak. Our salon is surrounded by windows - too large to call portholes - and I was again able to see one of my favorite sights as the rain fell hard on a wind-whipped ocean. Between the squalls, with swells moving every which way, the wind-generated waves on top of the ocean create a mosaic of white foam tips, and wave peaks and curls, a swirling mass of sharp upward-jutting edges punctuating the surface of the undulating ocean. When the rains come, the force of the droplets tends to flatten these tips, peaks and curls, and the surface of the sea takes on a velvety sheen, resembling a vast billowing piece of sand-etched glass, an outsized version of those green and blue pieces of weathered glass my beachcombing grandmother would collect and glue carefully to glass globes in her Florida condo. I love watching the gusts pass over the waves, flattened as they are by the rain, and seeing the wind pressing down on the matte-grey water, its gusts visible as shifting gradations of texture on the silky pockmarked surface. It's a nice way to pass time on a rainy Saturday at sea.

The swell patterns in this part of the Indian Ocean are a far cry from well-ordered. On prior passages, in the Pacific especially, the trade wind-driven swell patterns produce sets of reasonably well-ordered waves that follow one after another, a vast corrugated ripple moving in synch, toward the west-north west, across a blue ocean. Here, a succession of west-to-east moving deep low pressure systems in the deep southern latitudes - the Roaring Forties, between the southern tips of the continents and Antarctica - create a pulsing set of swells moving northeastward into the waters of the southern Indian Ocean. These swell patterns build over several thousands of miles until they cross, at right angles, the northwestward moving swells driven by the SE trade winds. The result, experienced by sailors going back into the earliest days of sea travel, is a mightily confused ocean, with northeast-running swells colliding continuously with northwest-running swells. It's as if the ocean at these latitudes reflects the present tense of its immediate weather, the trades, and the lingering memory of its southerly weather, the lows of the Roaring Forties. Unlike this poor sailor, the ocean seems not to be challenged by living in the present, even as it remembers the past.

By today, Sunday, the squall-laden front has passed us by to the west and north, but the strong winds persist, as do the confused seas. It's been a day of boat body slams, as one swell grabs our stern and another slams our beam, and then one grabs our beam while the other slams our stern. For us, a catamaran headed west-southwest, these conditions are especially annoying, since our broad beam and dual hulls catch the northeastern swells square on, while the north westward running swells swing our generous stern back and forth like a car skidding down an icy hill. We swing left and right, even as we roll back and forth, and the resulting corkscrewing motion is tolerable but tiring.

As a result of these conditions, we've reduced sail considerably, since the last thing we want is an untoward combination of a swell and a gust turning us onto our side. Unlike monohulls, whose deep lead-heavy keels provide a righting moment to return a flattened hull to its upright position, the catamaran is designed to either float right-side up or upside down - heeling is not part of its repertoire. So in deference to our design, we have only a reefed Genoa out, and the boat is being pushed along (or pulled, as it were) at about 5.5 knots, a tidy pace but one unlikely to approach the 7.5 knot average we enjoyed on our passage to Cocos from Bali. Over a 2300 mile passage, the difference between the two averages is the difference between a 17.5 day passage and a 12.7 day passage. With more orderly seas, we could have more sail out, and a corresponding increase in speed.

One's mental outlook on sailing can be tipped crucially in the face of a passage that suddenly seems to have sprouted an extra 5 or so days. Despite the oft-described glamor or adventure of ocean sailing, I have moments when I consider the time at sea to be somehow wasted; days flow into nights into days, and the meditative repetitiveness I described in an earlier blog can also resemble a mechanical monotony of waking and sleeping, an oscillating state of mindless motion. In fact, one cruising adage describes sailing as periods of excruciating boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

Neither bored nor terrorized, the disconnect between my expectations of a repeat of the fast Bali-Cocos passage, and the actual sea conditions has nonetheless caused a measure of discomfort in my soul, one entirely of my own making as my memory tricked me into a false expectation. We expected a fast, smooth passage, but the ocean has another plan. Our logical minds understand that we can only control the sails, and not the weather, but our spirits lag in their adjustment to the sea-level realities. I'm slow and reluctant to adjust expectations, wishing against experience that the confused seas will organize themselves, permitting a more aggressive sailing posture.

So that's the other side of a passage - the leap of faith and the need to recalibrate expectations when the new passage's conditions do not, in fact, correspond with the prior passage's conditions. We're out here, three days into the trip, assimilating the likelihood that this trip will surely take longer than we had hoped for, and in fact, shame on us, than we had expected. I'll get over it, if only because I have to: reality always wins. But it's caused me to reflect on the role of memory in generating expectations. I have a short attention span, so I expect tomorrow to look like yesterday. But the ocean has its own way of marrying the past with the present, into the future we'll face tomorrow, and, out of sight and out of mind from a pair of sailors spending a quiet week in a picturesque coral atoll, the sea made its own plans for our wind and sea conditions. The lows in the Roaring Forties continued to develop, deepen, and roll eastward. The swell patterns moved north, and the seas here remain confused. Our memories are short; the sea never forgets. Something to remember.

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Departing Cocos Keeling

It's Thursday morning here in the eastern end of the Indian Ocean. Jon and I have topped off the fuel, refilled our water tanks (thanks to a repaired water maker), and re-provisioned. After a final dinner and drinks with fellow cruisers on the beach, accompanied by music and a coconut fire, we are ready to head for Mauritius.

It will be a 2300 nautical mile passage and we're departing with two other boats, Pylades from Ireland and Second Wind from Juneau, Alaska. It's good to have company and someone within radio distance so we won't be alone out there. We expect the passage to take around 16 days, and you can track our progress using one of the links on the left hand side of the page.

Fair winds, Jon and Jennifer

Monday, September 12, 2011

Dry Season


Direction Island, Cocos Keeling, Australia

Years ago, Jennifer’s dad told me a Texas joke about rain that goes something like this:  “An old farmer stands with his son on his porch, gazing longingly at a distant dark cloud approaching his farm.  He turns to his visiting cousin, and says:  “I wish it would rain … not so much for me -- I’ve seen it rain -- but for my boy here …”

It’s been like that for ile de Grace these past months:  bone dry days and nights in the eponymous dry season.  When we left Cairns, Australia in late May, we had already entered the austral dry season, and had not seen rain for weeks.  Sailing up the Queensland coast, inside the Great Barrier Reef – no rain.  On our trip to the Spice Islands, we arrived in a brief shower as a low pressure trough meandered its way across the volcanic islands, spilling what little moisture it had stored up.  That was June 22.  Since then, throughout Indonesia – no rain, no drizzle, no sprinkles, no nothing.  It’s September 10 here in Cocos Keeling, Jennifer’s birthday, and we haven’t even seen a dark cloud since that June day … and before that, it was late April.  One brief rain shower in nearly five months. 

Our first rain since June 22 ...
So when we spotted the dark clouds on the southeastern horizon this afternoon, it took a moment to register – was that rain?  Could it be?  Soon enough, we saw the line of rain spattering the surface of the protected waters inside the reef, headed our way, and quickly, a cold rain began to pelt down, washing away the boat’s accumulated salt of our recent 7 day passage from Bali, providing a much-needed fresh water rinse for ile de Grace.   


Fresh water is scarce in most of the tropical waters for at least half the year.  Indonesia, like most tropical countries, lies parched for rain half the year, and then desperate for dryness the other half. As we sailed along the northern edge of Nusa Tengarra’s islands, the hillsides were parched brown, a far cry from the lushness of the wet season.  No surprise, of course, since it’s our choice, as sailors, to favor the dry seasons, as the winds tend to come from the southeast, perfect for our west-about circumnavigation. Once the winds swing around to the southwest, wet season arrives.  Several centuries ago, the coastal nations of the Indian Ocean used this semi-annual swing of the winds to trade with one another, heading west in the dry season, and east in the wet season, moving spices and textiles between the Asian and African continents.  The old trading ships cared more about cargo than rainclouds, and sailed in the wet season, but truth be told, we prefer dry sailing to wet sailing, hence our westabout circumnavigation.  However, after five months of dryness, enough is enough, and the rain fell, as they say, like manna from heaven.  Clear skies are great, but all things in moderation – including perfect weather.

In addition to marking Jennifer’s birthday, celebrated with a delightful dinner here in Cocos with six cruising friends, the rain also served as a providential reminder of my own dryness anniversary, coming up in two days.  Ten years ago, just a day after the 9/11 attacks, I realized that for me, even moderation was impossible, and I quit drinking alcohol.  That day, I began what is now a ten-year-and-continuing life voyage through the dry latitudes.  I don’t miss drinking these days; I am more than content to sail our boat, drink my Crystal Light lemonade, under sunny skies above, always grateful for the sunshine, but, it must be said, hoping for the occasional rain shower.  After all, I’ve seen it rain, but my boat ...

Thursday, September 8, 2011

Fingertips

One of the hidden treasures - in truth, aside from our fellow cruisers, the only treasure, hidden or otherwise - of Bali Marina was a well-stocked book swap room, with over 500 books piled on shelves and in boxes, left by passing sailors who had run out of room for already-read books. The swap at Bali Marina was started by my new friend, Bobby Friedman, who captains a large sailboat that's often based in the marina. (His entertaining and pungent blog, recommended reading, is here. I spent a morning inside the tiny swap room, arranging the books, perusing the titles, and re-stocking ile de Grace's library, as well as donating our already-read books that had been collecting mold on our shelves. With the exorbitant price of books in Australia ($25 for a paperback!), the bookless ports of eastern Indonesia, the untimely drowning of my Kindle, and my forced 3-week laying-in while Jennifer returned home, the tiny room and its book collection proved to be my salvation. Kudos to Bobby for starting something special.

The accidental discovery of new authors, courtesy of the cruising lifestyle's reliance on these book swaps, has been an unanticipated benefit of our trip. Boats being tight on space, few sailors keep books they've read, choosing instead to exchange them at ports of call. Across the Pacific, book swaps occurred wherever cruisers congregated.  In Tahiti, the books were piled up in the laundry room; on Rarotonga, at the nicest restaurant on the island. Your faithful correspondent has a nose for these places, and each time we stopped, Jennifer would plead with me to choose only the least-moldy books. As she points out, on a boat, what doesn't rust, molds, so to be fair, it's a real concern. I've managed to "discover" such disparate authors as David Mitchell, Ian Rankin, and Tim Winton, among others, and I'm in debt to those cruisers who have left those authors' books behind for others to enjoy.

The books at the Bali Marina tended to the mystery and thriller genres, although there was a Bible or two, some how-to sailing books (!), and a number of classic novels and non-fiction works. About one-third of the books were non-English - a heavy dose of German, some French, and a few Spanish. Patricia Cornwall's forensic detective novels seem to enjoy a wide international audience. In leafing through some of them, I was reminded of another cruising tradition - scribing books with the name and home port of the donating boat, along with the occasional note indicating which port the book had been picked up in. Reading these notations reminded me that books have lives of their own, often traveling from town to town, country to country, or, in this case, port to port, leaving a wake of readers in their path. Some of the Bali books had most recently been in South Africa, where we are headed; others, in Australia, Fiji, or Galapagos. It's an arresting image, this one of books migrating across oceans.

With Jennifer gone, and me resigned to keeping the boat safe and secure, the Bali books helped me pass the time. When Jennifer returned back from the states, in addition to replacing my Kindle, she also brought with her some books generously shared by some friends of ours in Austin, Texas. One of them, The Shadow of the Wind, by the Spanish author Carlos Ruiz Zafon, centers on the life of a book, and begins with a visit to "the Cemetery of Forgotten Books." The Cemetery houses "books that are lost in time," and is a place where they "live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader's hands." As Zafon's character relates, "in truth, books have no owners."

I happen to collect books and can attest to the assertion that books have no owners; I'm loathe to throw any book out, preferring instead to donate it to a library, sell it to a used book store, or give it to a friend - I don't feel as if I own a book, only that I am a custodian. Like Bobby, I've created a book swap or two with my excess volumes, and I imagine these book swaps attracting other donations and living on for months and years to come. I've come to realize that there's a reader for every book, and a surprise in every collection. The Zafon book is case in point -- a mesmerizing book of passions, centered on books, with each chapter answering one question in the unfolding mystery, and posing two more - creating a momentum and urgency that's addictive.

Having fallen asleep reading, I woke from my midday nap (with alternating 4 hour watches, you sleep when you can) with an image of fingertips touching books, and of readers connecting to one another through the physical act of touching the same book, even if separated in space and time. In this, the Kindle, for all its obvious benefits to a space-constrained reader, cannot hope to compete. There is something magical about touching a book that others have read and others will read ∑ to me, books create a palpable sense of connection between readers, especially if the readers share the same physical book.

And so this, written as we sail briskly on a broad reach, under a bright sky across a blue Indian Ocean:


Fingertips


From time to time, I pull down the book
You gave me the afternoon before I left,
And examine the paper on each page,
Recalling that your fingertips once rested
Here, and here, leaving a patina of memory
That I now touch, tip to tip, print to print,

As if by pressing against the paper,
I can pull your hand away from this book,
Like a glove lifting off the page, sliding back,
Your skin wrapping around my fingers, my wrist,
So that once again we might read these words together.

Saturday, September 3, 2011

Humidity

On certain windless nights, like this one, the small weather station on the corner of our navigator's table indicates a humidity level approaching 100 percent. The air temperature in the cooler Indian Ocean is a seemingly-chilly 77 degrees, and at these lower temperatures, it doesn't take much to saturate the air hovering above the gently undulating pale green waters of this new ocean. It's our first time in - or, more accurately, on - the Indian Ocean, and our first day began with a gentle casting off from the concrete docks of Bali Marina, a morning glide out of the harbor and then the turn to the west-southwest, towards Cocos Keeling, Mauritius, and South Africa. The water temperature careened wildly between 72 and 82 degrees as we passed through upwellings associated with the strong south-setting current carrying water from the north side of the Indonesian archipelago to the Indian Ocean on its southern shores. The southern tip of Bali - far removed by distance and an isthmus from the tourist-laden streets and alleyways of Kuta, Sanur, and Denpasar - lay to our starboard, cliffs that are slowly being excavated and buttressed to support yet-more villas, hotels, and condominiums.

On these kinds of nights, with the decks and cushions saturated with salty dew, it's not that comfortable to sit outside - the dampness, and the chilly air, keep me inside the cabin where, in the intimacy of a boat and an ocean, the humidity is still high enough to leave the wooden floors slick with a thin layer of moisture. It's Friday, and we're headed west toward a setting waxing moon, motoring across a windless ocean. I had hoped it wouldn't be like this; the weather forecasts indicated winds from the east-southeast at about 15-20 knots, conditions that are perfect for our genaker, a large, light sail that pulls the boat nicely along in those kind of following winds. Instead, except for a brief period of southerly winds where our genaker-mainsail combination propelled us along at 6-7 knots, we've had nothing more than a whisper of wind from the southeast. One of the occupational hazards of tropical sailing is that the sub-tropical tradewinds sometimes die out near the equator, a victim of the competing offsetting coriolis forces that also prevent hurricanes from crossing the equator. I'm glad we have full fuel tanks as well as an extra 200 liters in jerry cans, but I wish we had wind.

We were happy to leave Bali and resume our passage-making; while we would have liked to have visited more of the mountainous interior of Bali, and its iconic Hindu cultural towns and shrines, we were ready to continue our westing. Jennifer's unexpected visit home and, a result of boat safety and security issues related to our boat in these Indonesian waters, my forced laying-in on ile de Grace, left us each eager to enter the dreamlike, meditative state of an ocean passage. In these eastern waters, having visited Thailand and Vietnam, and now Bali, we've picked up a few books on meditation, and one in particular highlighted the practical elements - find a comfortable place and position, empty your mind through concentration on breathing, and achieve a state of relaxation and tranquility. Sounds easy ... and it led me to reflect on the way in which extended voyages - especially those in relatively peaceful conditions -create for me conditions conducive to a period of extended meditation. In my case, it's being surrounded by a boat I trust, with a person I love, that together satisfy the first general requisite - place and position - and then, over the first few days, a gradual and unavoidable emptying of my mind from everything not related to the sea below me, the sky above me, and the boat around me. It's as elemental a concern, this act of seamanship, as breathing except on a larger scale as befits the circumstances of being alone on a lonely ocean. There are few distractions, and few opportunities to engage the rest of the world; I yield to the enormity of an oceanic expanse, and find myself quickly in a slightly-altered state of awareness, keenly connected to a mind free of outside intrusions, aware only of my next breath, the next swell, the approaching cloud bank.

Twenty months into our circumnavigation, I have begun to reflect on how this time away from friends, family, work, the trappings of a land-based, 5-day work, 2 day weekend life - how this adventure has and will have changed me. I confess to finding it difficult if not impossible to arrive at any reportable insights. I feel I am the same person that set sail from Annapolis .. but of course, that's not possible. I feel perhaps a victim of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle that an observer can measure either a particle's position or its path of motion, but not both simultaneously. I know I'm on a boat, sailing west, but in a metaphysical sense I don't know who I've become on this boat, nor where, again metaphysically speaking, I'm headed. In this, I am reminded my own experience as a parent: looking back on my two kids' development, I can draw a precise line from their infant and child behaviors to their present-day idiosyncrasies, preferences, tendencies, etc. ... but, of course, during their childhood,- and certainly today -- I had and have no idea where they might be headed or who or what they might become or achieve. Put another way, viewed retrospectively, we are, it seems, depressingly predictable. It's as if we are simultaneously following a pre-ordained path, plain only in retrospect, while simultaneously feeling as if we're making it up as we go along.

More personally, I can see clearly how I ended up here, on a boat dripping wet with Indian Ocean humidity, at a seemingly-inevitable point in space and time, reflecting on who and what I am, but I can't see where I'm headed. Or, I can see where I'm headed - back home to the States, to a job as yet-undefined and undiscovered, to my friends and family - but without any sense of how these experiences might have changed me once I get there. A related principle of physics is that the act of observing an event changes the event, and here, in a steadily-dampening cabin, motoring across an undulating black expanse of ocean, I am frustrated that my introspection on how this voyage might be changing me seems to run aground on the timeless principle that the observer cannot observe the observer; we cannot determine where we are, and simultaneously predict where we might be.

Perhaps all I can say is this: that this act of removing myself from zones of familiarity and comfort, from paths taken daily, from relationships and expectations that flow seamlessly one day to the next ... this act of disrupting irrevocably both my position and my path ... this voyage seems to offer me a the possibility of a new future, a future where I might enjoy the illusion, or perhaps, the reality, of consciously moving off any pre-ordained pathway, to a new, yet-to-be-arrived-at position, sailing a new, yet-to-be-defined course, where what I see, what I feel, and who I am will reflect a new perspective, even a new history, fashioned imperceptibly during this seagoing three-year voyage around our magnificent blue planet.

Thursday, September 1, 2011

Leaving Bali, Indonesia

After a wonderful time cruising the eastern islands of the Indonesian archipelago, ile de Grace leaves tomorrow for Cocos Keeling, and from there, onward to Mauritius and South Africa.  As always, you can track our position as we sail westward across the Indian Ocean using one of the links located on the left side of this page, or by clicking here  (includes track to date) or here (includes short message re: current conditions).

We try and update our position daily, ham radio conditions permitting.

Wishing all of you fair winds and following seas!