Saturday, October 29, 2011

Company

The other day, during one of the frequent windless spells on this longer-than-expected passage, Jennifer voiced a desire to see a mammal. We've been visited regularly by birds and bioluminescent cellular creatures, but aside from the three other crew, mammals have been noticeably absent from our environment. We can usually count on some porpoises, and we had a few visit us in the first few days, but, 9 days in to this passage from Mauritius to South Africa, Jennifer was getting, well, lonesome.

The following night, just after dinner, Geert made his usual way up to the helm station, making one of his regular visits to make sure the various electronic devices were working up to specs. Geert is a traditionalist, a welcome addition to this techno-dependent scribe's perhaps-excessive reliance on the newest gadget, although I get the sense he's come to appreciate the finer elements of autopilots and chartplotters. Not five minutes passed, when the phrase "Thar she blows," uttered in his Dutch-accented English, brought us all up on deck. A few moments later, a long grey humpback whale swam lazily alongside our sailboat, the top of its great, stippled body revealing the eponymous triangular wedge, or humpback, of one of nature's largest mammals.

What Jennifer wants, Jennifer gets.

We had last seen whales in close proximity during our unforgettable snorkeling expedition in Tonga, and before that, when a pair of humpbacks escorted us out of the tiny harbor in Rarotonga. In earlier times, Jennifer had sailed with them during her trans-Atlantic crossing, famously "braking for whales" when one appeared just ahead of our little boat on her way to the Azores. I've seen them from time to time as well, most recently on a Bermuda passage on my friend Terry's boat. Each time, the arrival of a visiting whale leaves me gawking at their majestic, sinuous glide through the water, their passing punctuated by the regular 'shooshing' of water vapor being expelled from their blowholes. This trip's visit was no exception, and we spent the remaining minutes between dusk and dark staring at the 15 meter mammal that swam alongside us, not 20 meters off the port hull, breathing regularly, seeming not to break a sweat as he checked us out, even as we gazed starstruck.

As the whale's body traced a slick wake just south of our boat, its length and girth approaching our vessel's size, I recalled a recent note posted on the reference website for ocean passagemakers, www.noonsite.com, alerting sailors to a recent instance where a whale breached and landed on a sailboat off the coast of South Africa. Our experience has been that these graceful behemoths are extraordinarily aware of their marine surroundings, as evidenced by the apparent deliberate avoidance of our seal-like snorkeling bodies during our Tongan foray. Nonetheless, facts are stubborn things, so I was mentally rehearsing the procedures for abandoning our ship while simultaneously drinking in the magic of the moment.

The next day, recounting our sighting to a fellow cruiser on our twice-daily ham radio chat, he asked if we were scared at the close approach of the whale, and I replied, in an overly-nonchalant way, "No - it's not like we had any choice," to which we both chuckled the nervous laugh of people who knew better.

Unhappily, we've not seen our passing cetacean or any of its pod-based friends since - the whale probably let the pod know we were friendly, not having seen a Japanese whaling ship flag or harpoon gun on our foredeck. Its appearance however, foreshadowed a second act to the natural world's traveling show of unique maritime wonders.

The next day, as if to prove that there's more than just mammals in the sea, nature treated us to a second remarkable spectacle, this one from the non-mammalian denizens of our salty biosphere. At 7 in the morning, as Jennifer and I were reliving the prior night's whale sighting, I spied a set of splashes off the port bow, splashes that soon multiplied, even as sea birds began to arrive from who-knows-where to check out the action. After a few minutes, it became clear that a great school of tuna was feeding near the surface, churning up the dawn-gray, rubbery surface of a windless sea. Every minute or so, a bullet-shaped streak of yellow-limned muscle would leap out of the sea in a short arc, surrounding by churning water and other frothing tuna.

In a matter of minutes, the empty sky was filled with sea birds flying in from all directions, alerted to the presence of leftover scraps by the screeching of their earlier-arriving avian companions. Before long, over 300 birds were skittering about the sea surface above the feeding orgy, adding yet another layer of frenzy to the morning's schedule. We were over 200 miles from land, and normally, these pelagic birds travel solo, or in pairs, so I amazed at these birds' ability to communicate the presence of food to their avian kin across dozens of miles of ocean in an apparent instant.

We sailed on, westward, and watched the feeding school of tuna and scavenging flock of birds remain resolutely about 200 meters in front of our boat, as if they were pulling us along, moving together, school, flock, and boat towards Africa, 4-5 nautical miles per hour. This went on for an hour or so before we began to theorize, perhaps anthropomorphically, that this school of tuna was using the westward motion - and surface disruption - of our boat to help school the bait fish. We were the horses behind the cattle stampede, driving the baitfish forward, allowing the tuna to concentrate on the feeding. Evidence for this perhaps-naïve theory came an hour later - a full two hours after the feeding frenzy began - when the wind conditions shifted and we turned the boat to the northwest, a full 45 degrees off the prior course.

As if they had approved the memo directing the course change, the still-significant flock of pelagic birds, the still-churning school of tuna, and, presumably, the ever-diminishing assembly of bait fish took a collective turn to the northwest, remaining about 200 meters off our bow. In the end, the spectacle played out on our proverbial front yard for a solid five hours, without letup. We had traveled over 20 miles, in a elbow-shaped arc across a vast ocean, and for every step of the way, our path was paved by baitfish, tuna, and sea birds.

I suppose we might have played an unwitting part in the herding of the baitfish, but it's hard to fathom the means by which the tuna managed to keep the baitfish school contained even with our vessel's assist from the stern. The entire drama of "big-fish-eat-little-fish=and-birds-pick-up-the-pieces" played out in a 50 meter-wide rectangle extending from between 200 to 400 meters off our bow - a rectangular cafeteria of 1000 square meters - one hectare. These dimensions remained unchanged regardless of our bow's direction, or, for that matter, our boat's speed, which varied from 3 to 5 knots.

Over an 18 hour period, the four humans on ile de Grace were treated to remarkable display of marine life at its wildest. Alone on an ocean, with only ourselves for company, we appreciated the distraction, and felt blessed to have had the chance to bear unexpected witness to these demonstrations of inexplicable natural phenomena, to these curious cetaceans, these herding tuna, and these magic gatherings of foraging sea birds. Lonesome no more.

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Memories Created and Memories Retrieved

Below is a guest posting from our long-time friend and now shipmate, Keith Stevenson.
(Received on 26 October 2011)

This is an entry from a blog interloper, one of two passengers described on the Ile de Grace's waybill as "crew," because of their longstanding friendships with Jon and Jen. Aside from sharing watch duties and lending a hand with the frequent changes in sail configurations on this Mauritius to South Africa leg of Grace's circumnavigation, Geert van der Kolk and I actually lead enviable lives, devoted mainly to reading and contemplation in the Southern Spring sun that sparkles on the endless blue Indian Ocean.

Foreign journeys expose us to new experiences from which come memories that we carry with us as long as we live. To expand on Ratty's observation to Mole, there is, however, nothing, nothing quite like messing about for a couple of weeks on a beautifully engineered 44' catamaran in the middle of one of the great oceans, relying only on three gracious and generous companions for food, shelter, transportation, good conversation, and for life itself -- or at least one's safe delivery at the possibly perilous journey's end! Here new experiences and the memories they nurture come every day. And, for one returning to the land of his birth, these experiences also retrieve and refurbish old memories.

The new experiences are easy to catalog and their impacts are relatively straightforward. The open ocean is vast and awe-inspiring (cliché, I know). The power of the waves when you're on top of them is quite frightening. A humpback whale's patent leather skin arching through the water as he escorts the boat for a few hundred meters is delightful. When flocks of birds swarm in a frantic cacophony above water churning with tuna feeding on bait fish fleeing Grace, one has seen "nature red in tooth and claw."

On board, life is a series of new experiences, at least for one who's never sailed a small boat on the open sea. Grace's navigation and electronic steering systems are so sophisticated that after a couple of days of instruction , I can be trusted on the solo night watches to make simple steering decisions and keep us away from steel leviathans carrying cargo to ports around the world. This is very exciting. The mechanics of changing sail arrangements in wind and swell challenge the balance of the Medicare-eligible, but this is the group that needs more adrenalin pulses. Bring it on!

Other experiences are more complex, drawing on both the present and the past. My wife, Catherine and I have known Jon and Jen for 20 years. Even after lengthy separations, one drops back into the friendship with no change in rhythm. They remain the same warm, welcoming, loving, exciting people, from whom one grabs all one can from their trove of new books, music, technology, ideas, recipes and people to enrich one's own life. And so, being with them on their boat, brings back memories of times in West Hartford, DC and Tampa. Memories flood back of dads and sons playing ice hockey on Woodridge Lake in the dusk. Little Katie Glaudemans, the only representative of her gender, scraps for the puck and refuses to be denied. She who is now the accomplished Kate who will decide whether or not my blog is worthy of posting . . . !

Experiences redolent of my South African past are the most complex. From the boat at night, the stars are brilliant in the pitch dark and the Magellan Clouds still create a silver carpet for Orion and his dogs, who never stop chasing Taurus, the bull, toward the Southern Cross. When you think that your head will burst from it all, Jupiter rises to blot out the lesser lights and then the Moon comes up to wash away almost all of the characters the Greeks worked so hard to invent. Just as it was when 55 years ago a shivering Boy Scout looked up from his winter camp and drew in his breath hard.

The most complex retrieved memory or set of memories on this trip came from a chance remark by Geert that, as a schoolboy in Holland, he had had to study the South African Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902. To prove his point, he began singing, almost flawlessly, a plaintive Afrikaans ballad written around that time, called "Sarie Marais." In it a Boer prisoner of war, far from his homeland, longs for the sweetheart from whom he is separated ("My Sarie Marais is so ver van my hart en ek hoop om haar weer te sien.") This song has the same impact on Afrikaners that "Loch Lomond" has on the Scots. It also shares oblique suggestions that the separation may not be temporary. He cries out to be returned to the Transvaal where he and Sarie can be together again ("Oo bring my terug na die ou Transvaal; daar waar my Sarie woon."). Not only did this retrieve long-buried, complex memories of my own Afrikaner heritage, but it took me back 43 years to two graduate students in love, separated by the distance between MIT and NYU. The intensity of the loss of the other was as intense as any POW for his sweetheart. Now that marriage has minimized these separations, when they do occur, as now, they are as intense.

So, thank you Geert for retrieving these memories.
Good night Catherine; we'll soon be together again in the old Transvaal.
Thank you Jon and Jen for creating the environment for all these memories.
And thank you Kate for posting this.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Variation

Time was, I could trust my compass. It sits at the helm station, just forward of the wheel, its red globe bobbing in the glass-enclosed mineral water, telling me where I'm going. On a featureless sea, with sun and stars frequently occluded, it's a vital piece of equipment even in these days of GPS satellites and handheld navigational devices. But here, just south of Madagascar, I can't trust it so much anymore.

For most people and in most places on earth, the geologic fact that the Earth's magnetic north pole lies a short distance away from its geographic north pole is of no consequence. A few degrees difference here and there, and, well, north is north right? Down here, in the southwestern Indian Ocean, it's a different story. Here, the bizarre worlds of spherical geometry and our planetary core combine to create a significant difference between true and magnetic north. Here, my compass has me pointed northwest, but the boat is headed west, or thereabouts. It's as if I'm in my car in Phoenix, set the compass to get me to San Francisco, but instead find myself driving to Los Angeles. Nothing against Los Angeles, but still.

A glance at the pilot charts reveals the issue: the magnetic deviation - the difference between true North and magnetic north - is about 23.5 degrees in these waters, and as we sail south and west to clear eventually the Cape of Good Hope, the deviation increases sharply to about 30 degrees. We know this now, so we can correct for this variance, but back in the proverbial day, clipper ships relying exclusively on compasses must either have spent many sleepless nights or had a warped sense of the cartography of South Africa. Hats off to the ancient mariners!

So now our compass reads northwest while we sail west, the bright dawning sun behind us shining its flat yellow light across the surface of a newly-stilled ocean. In a few hours the sun will lift high enough to hit our solar panels, and charge our batteries, but for now, it fills our tiny salon with a glowing light, fluttering through the cockpit doors, etching sharp shadows on the instrument panel in front of me. It's dawn, and we're sailing into a gray-blue western sky smudged with thin streaks of lavender clouds, 100 miles south of the bottom of Madagascar.

We're getting better at internalizing the magnetic variation, and our regular ham radio reports to our cruising companions and to the volunteers at the shore-based South Africa Maritime Mobile Net distinguish between magnetic and true when we report boat heading and wind direction. Our electronic chart plotter makes the adjustment automatically; the minor year-to-year changes in magnetic variation are programmed into the software. Chart programmers and sailors know that the magnetic pole wanders beneath our feet. Overhead, for different reasons, even Polaris, the North Star, moves its celestial position over the millennia. Our natural north poles, our lodestone and lodestar, are not static. Even when we think we know where we're going, the guideposts change, our compasses and sextant readings twitch and flicker, and we may not arrive where we thought we were headed.

We've had variation aplenty in our sailing as well; for the first time on our circumnavigation's passages, we're experiencing shifts in wind direction and strength on a several-times-daily basis, necessitating near-constant vigilance and oh-so-frequent changes in sail plan and direction. It's as if we're sailing on a mountain lake, with gusts and lulls coming and going from all directions. These are unsettled waters, with the lows that sweep westward between Antarctica and Africa spinning off weather patterns that extend their tendrils some several hundred miles north, where we sail in warm air and waters. We manage, paying more attention to the weather, forced to sail the wind instead of barreling ahead unwaveringly to our next waypoint. We're more conscious of weather we once took for granted, of the inherent variability of the forces around us, and that making an intended landfall requires continual adjustments in course.

The dynamics on our little boat have also undergone a change on this passage, with the welcome addition of two friends, one well-experienced in ocean sailing, and the other, happily, extremely well-adapted to the peculiar demands of an extended voyage on a tiny boat. Our friends, Geert and Keith, have added immeasurably to the comfort and safety and camaraderie of this leg of our trip, and have provided, perhaps unknowingly, a prism through which my and Jennifer's partnership shines brightly, revealing the complementary and supporting roles we each play for each other. It's been a delight being both participant and witness to the new boat dynamics, and being the recipient of insights derived by varying and sharing the roles and responsibilities of sailing across this broad expanse of ocean. We're headed home, with ever-growing awareness of the unconscious education the trip has provided us individually and as a couple.

In that vein, when I finish this post, I will haul out my guitar and play a few of my favorite songs, including the Tom Waits classic "Long Way Home," and the Ryan Adams gem "When Will You Come Back Home." While Waits reminds his lover of his lifelong habit of taking the long way home, Adams closes his stanzas with the wistful phrase: "If I could find my way back home, where would I go?" These Indian Ocean winds and waves seem to compel us to take the long way home, even as this circumnavigation's yet-to-be-written closing chapter leaves open the possibility of a yet-to-be-discovered home for Jennifer and me.

It's a bit unsettling, all this variation and uncertainty, but a book I've been reading offers a degree of reassurance. It's a heavy read, perhaps only possible on a broad expanse of ocean or a desert or a quiet room, but Stephen Hawking's new book, The Grand Design, reminded me of the role uncertainty and variation played in the formation of our universe. As revealed by quantum physicists, and their insights into life's intrinsic uncertainty, we now know that in its first nanoseconds, the Big Bang spawned miniscule variations in the temperature distribution of our particular universe. Without these variations, we would not have our gravity-spawned galaxies, stars, planets, or humankind as we know it. Thank goodness for uncertainty, variation, and quantum physics.

So I don't mind sailing on a globe where the magnetic pole wanders around and stars meander, using a compass that can lead me astray, through wind and wave conditions that fluctuate ceaselessly. I don't mind the disruptions in routine that arise when our two-person cocoon expands to embrace two friends, shining a light on the possibility of new insights and perspectives. And I don't mind sailing home the long way, finding our way home to a place we can't quite yet define, somewhere beyond the shaky light of this Indian Ocean morning.

Saturday, October 22, 2011

Tropics

A few nights ago, on our way from Mauritius to Richards Bay, South Africa, we left the tropics, sailing southwest across the south latitude of 23 degrees, 26 minutes, a latitude that defines the southern limit of the Tropic of Capricorn. Coincidentally, just as we crossed this line that defines the southern limit of the sun's ecliptic, the moon rose, half-full, against a clear eastern sky. This morning, as I assumed the watch, the sun lifted up from a glassy sea, a low haze betraying the complete absence of wind. Motoring southwest toward a waypoint 150 nautical miles south of the island of Madagascar, I imagined a line between the moon and the sun, and realized that astronomically speaking, the sun and moon now lay north of us. We are south of any of our previous positions on this circumnavigation, and we continue to head south to clear the Cape of Good Hope.

We entered the tropics over 20 months ago, as we sailed south through the Bahamas, passing across the north latitude of 23 degrees, 26 minutes, my home hemisphere's reciprocal tropic, the Tropic of Cancer. For roughly 630 days, we have been sailing in the so-called tropics, the portion of our globe that lies between these two ecliptics, these lines of latitude, a band of land and ocean where, at one time or another during the earth's rotation around the sun, the sun shines directly overhead. North or south of these ecliptics, the sun never passes directly overhead, and of course, near the poles, the sun can sit so low in the sky that it is either day or night continuously, depending on the season.

Not coincidentally, the earth's axis - North to South Poles - lies at a 23 degree, 26 minute angle to the plane of its celestial orbit. We live on a planet that is perpetually tipped, a leaning top spinning once daily, even as it rotates annually around the sun. We also wobble as a planet, the entire earth shimmying on its axis, just as a spinning top will wobble as it loses its angular momentum and slows before falling.

As a boy, I would play with gyroscopes and spinning tops, watching them balance on pieces of string, maintaining an improbable sense of balance, or tracing out spirals as they spun across a table top. You could move the string, and watch the gyroscope maintain its upright orientation, or blow on these spinning tops, and move them here and there. Later, as a teenager, I spent hours mastering the skill of spinning a basketball on the tip of my finger - a useless skill, and time I might I have better spent improving my dismal jump shot. I learned that I could keep the ball spinning continuously by brushing my hand along its side, at its equator, thus adding angular momentum to offset that lost by friction.

To a sailor crossing ecliptics, relying on tradewinds, and watching sun and moon rises, the earth's complex orbital mechanics are easy to witness but difficult to describe or analyze. With my daily exposure to wind and the continual surface instability of the oceans, I am tempted to explain our earth's mechanics by reversing the actual chain of causality. For example, I might imagine the tradewinds of our planet brushing the planet's tropical zones, keeping it moving on a galactic fingertip, with the ocean's rising and falling swells and waves altering our planet's center of gravity, causing a shimmy. In my imaginary universe, I can assign to these shifting winds and waters the full responsibility for our earth's tilt, its spinning, its precession, its wobble. In my less lucid moments, I think that perhaps the scientists have it backward, and instead of the earth's rotation causing the winds, and by extension, the wave patterns, it's the cyclones and rogue waves, tsunamis and floods, gales and calms that push our planet around, change its weight distribution, leaving us all perpetually off-kilter, teetering, sliding close to the edge of the universe, lucky on a good day to be blown back to the center of the table. Perhaps, in our lives and for our universe, our spinning and wobbling do vary with wind and wave, and as we begin to fall, the winds and waves ease, and, somehow, we manage to regain our balance. Nonsensical logic to be sure, but easy to imagine while sailing on these shifting seas, across ecliptics, pushed by winds, buffeted by forces surely strong enough to move the earth. In any event, on quiet mornings like this one, whatever the direction of causality, I am grateful to be part of this ride of a lifetime.

One of my favorite songs is one called Big Blue Ball, sung by Jesse Winchester, with the stanza: "I don't even know where we are/They tell us we're circling a star/Well I'll take their word cause I don't know/But I'm dizzy so maybe it's so." It's hard not to feel dizzy sometimes, sailing on a flat, glassy ocean, the horizon just a slightly lighter shade of blue, hazy in the distance all around, knowing that we're spinning like a top through the stars, leaning over, wobbling, and moving all the while around a sun that seems to rise and fall daily, even as it rests, by most measures stationary, in a galaxy of like stars. Nights like last night, on a calm sea, seem to be the best time to try and grasp the magnitude and magnificence of this celestial reality, to absorb the simultaneous insight of being part of a universe whose scale and scope and complex movements dwarf the human imagination, and, at the same time, accept the unique and undeniable centrality and importance of our own individual existence within that universe.

Reconciling these seemingly contradictory sensations - insignificance and significance - the earth rotating around a sun, and a universe rotating around me - is perhaps the only way to emerge from the sense of vertigo occasioned by our ability to describe celestial mechanics. For even as we describe orbits, precessions, wobbles, seasons, and arbitrary lines of latitude crossed by a tiny boat on a big ocean, we each find ourselves yearning for a self-affirming sense of importance on this planet and in this universe. For me, this paradox takes the following form: I know, in my head that neither cyclones nor rogue waves nor human behavior move our planet, and thus my role, guided by my heart, and as transient and as trivial as it may be when measured against the natural galactic rhythms across millennia, may simply be to help my fellow inhabitants of this fragile ball we call home keep our weight centered, maintain our collective balance, and, against all odds, remain upright.

We're now a hundred and twenty miles south of the Tropic of Capricorn, headed further south still. The breezes become more variable as we move below the tropics, with its tradewinds and monsoons. We're in the southern Indian Ocean, surrounded by an equidistant horizon whose demarcation sharpens as the morning sun burns away the fog, haze, and clouds. It'll be another bright, hot windless day on our boat, on a little patch of ocean, in this little corner of a spinning globe, rotating around a small star that now transits to our north. And even as we absorb these literal cosmic truths, we nonetheless find ourselves sailing at peace in the middle of our own little world, seemingly unaffected by ecliptics and wobbles, reconciling two competing sensations, knowing in our heads that even if we don't matter on a galactic scale, we know in our hearts to keep ourselves and each othered centered, balanced, and upright, doing our best not to get dizzy.
-------------------------------------------------

1/3 of the way there!!!

We caught a 4 foot mahi mahi and celebrated Geert's daughter, Jana's 24th birthday with a cake....


Heard via sailmail, all is well.

Monday, October 17, 2011

Grace Has Left the Port!

Grace has left Port Louis, Mauritius and is expecting a 12-14 day sail to Richard Bay, South Africa.

Keep updated on their position with the links provided!

Sunday, October 16, 2011

A Day at the Races

What better way to spend a Saturday afternoon than at the horse races? Port Louis has a racetrack within walking distance from the marina and Jon and I, accompanied by our two friends and new crew members who are going to sail with us to South Africa, Keith and Geert, spent a day at the races. We were joined with our new friends from Small Nest and Blauwe Penguin. Small nest is from Belgium and Wilem and Heike have three children aboard. Blauwe Pengquin, or Blue Penguin, is from Holland and is owned by a young couple, Ben and Anika.

Is this my winner?
For me, it was a new experience. Though I have been to many rodeos in my day, I had never been to a horse race. I had never bet on an animal. There were eight races over the course of the afternoon and I watched carefully as our friends placed their bets. Knowing nothing about the sport, I wondered how to chose. Do you pick the horse whose name you like best, or is it the jockey's name, or is it the jockey's colors? They had a book with all sorts of information about the horse's weight, past 5 performances, and how the horse was favored, but it still seemed like guessing to me. The favorite did not always win.

Jon and Keith do the analysis.
Our friend Keith, however, used to work at a race track in his youth in Cape Town, South Africa. More importantly, he definitely knows the laws of probability and how to play the odds. He and Jon would bet "in the middle," that is, they would not bet on the favorite because its pay off would be the least. Nor would they bet on the long shots because, although their payoffs would be greatest, they were very unlikely to win or place. Keith and Jon also often bet to place rather than win, which paid off less, but meant they often enjoyed the thrill of "winning." That said, the minimum bet was 100 rupees, which is less than $3.50 and so their winnings combined would not have bought either one of them dinner.

Geert, with reporters notepad in hand
Our friend Geert, a journalist and novelist, looked upon this as an opportunity for social observation and to gain insights into the life of our lovely island. Because he was wearing long pants, Geert was allowed into the paddock area where the horses are gathered and readied before each race. He was a roving reporter, also covering the action on the grounds, the stands, and behind the stands where the bets are placed. Eventually Geert joined us spectators and placed a bet as well. He is keeping his results secret, so we assume he was not so lucky.

The three children of Small Nest took a different strategy. They always bet on the long shots in the hopes of "winning big." Though they consistently lost their bets, they never gave up hope nor their enthusiasm for the next race. Eventually, their optimism paid off. The last race of the day, when many people had already left, they placed their bet on a long shot, horse number 8. When the starting gates were released and the horses were heading toward the first turn, number 8 was dead last. Without binoculars, which we sailors all have but forgot to bring with us to the track, we could not follow the race very well when the horses were on the opposite side, but as they turned the last corner and came into the "home stretch," the excitement built as we cheered for our horse. The race was close, but one horse was closing in on the favored leader....it was number 8. By the time they approached the finish line, number 8 won by a nose.  These kids were beyond ecstatic, they had finally won a BIG payoff, about 1800 rupees for a 100 bet.

As for me, I placed bets on two races. One was based on liking the horse's name. The other was based on going for the long shot win in the last race. I bet big, for me, on two horses. Number 7 to win and number 9 to place. So close to number 8, but I came up empty. It was with accurate foresight that I kissed my money goodbye when I placed my bets with the cashier. He laughed, and so did I. So I was not a winner, but I had a winning day.

Parting Shots

Some pictures of Mauritius, where South Asia meets Africa:

The Black River Gorge, looking northeast, with the Indian Ocean in the background.

Waterfalls in the Black River National Park

Islands are home to incredible species diversity

Nearly every island we've sailed to has offered us fresh produce and fruit in the locals' market.
 


Up close and intimate with dinner, at the local market
Singing for our supper; that's Fergus, with the squeezebox, and Kay, of Pylades

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Circling

I was fortunate to take a course in poetry writing from Elizabeth Bishop while in college, an experience severely tempered by two subsequent events, the far-more tragic being her untimely death just after teaching a few classes.  At the time, it seemed other-worldy to me, and I was ill equipped to appreciate the magnitude of the loss to her friends and to poetry.  History continues to be kind to Elizabeth Bishop, and her stature as one of the world's great 20th century poets seems to grow with each passing day.

Much later, in the wake of several biographies and the publication of a sampling of her voluminous letters, I learned -- to my deep chagrin -- of her deep dislike for teaching, and, it turns out, the students at MIT, the school which hired her just a few months prior to my taking her class, after Harvard ended its relationship.  In one letter or relation, she is reported to have asked why these students (i.e., me and a few others) were taking her class at all, instead of science courses.  The biography quotes her as follows:  "Why would they want to write poetry, anyway?"  It was a sobering rejoinder, delivered, as it were, from the grave.  Today, in the wake of the death of Steve Jobs, I wonder what she would have said to his claim that computer science is a liberal art.

Nonetheless, I have always harbored a love of poetry, hers in particular, and have, on this voyage, again returned to the risky business of memorializing poetic efforts on these postings.  One of the early, and as it turns out, only, lessons she gave to our small course was the importance of form in poetry.  Not for her the free verse and lower case obsessions of many beat poets; she favored strict, traditional forms, extraordinary attention to the exact word, phrase, and spacing, and, unusually for poets of these days, a definite rhyme scheme.  The exactness of her writing style, and her comparatively sparse lifetime output, might best be reflected in a quote attributed to Paul Valery, the French poet and critic:  "A poem is never finished, only abandoned."

I do not begrudge her dislike of teaching, or even her offhand quip about my fellow MIT students; she kept alive in me a love a poetry and a deeper appreciation of form and rhyme.  To that, below is a villanelle, a traditional form of poetry.  The notable poems in this form that readers may recognize are Bishop's own One Art, and the John Donne classic Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night, whose timeless quality each serve to remind me that Bishop may have been right about me and my fellow MIT students ... maybe we should have stuck to the science classes!


Circling

We set out on this boat across this ocean,
just we two again, through sun and rain,           
to avoid or some say chase the lonesome

sense of oneness when you feel the motion
of sameness everywhere:  a wheat field plain,
an interstate highway, or these swells atop this ocean.

It was time to sail when we felt the clouds encroaching,
gathering around us, circling and calling our names,
beckoning us from or some say toward a lonesome

togetherness, where we can see the most in
each other, embrace the silent process of change,
and construct a new joining of selves on this ocean.

Here, we yield to weather, and see the water hosting
our memories of calms and storms, as waves explain
how we mark or some might say ignore the lonesome

birth of this common voyage, this fanciful notion
of sailing around the world, of leaving the game.
It's halfway gone, this voyage lovely lonesome;
we’re halfway there, across an undulating ocean.







Sunday, October 9, 2011

Sampler Plate

Two and a half years may seem like a long time to be “on vacation.” Long enough to come to know a place more fully than if one were a fly in and fly out tourist. But when circumnavigating the globe, the truth is we barely scratch the surface on the various landfalls we are lucky enough to visit. Our travels are more like trying the sampler plate in a restaurant.

Seeing a foreign land by sailboat is definitely a distinct kind of tourism. We quickly learn where it is safe to anchor, where to provision diesel, propane, and food. We spend a fair amount of time doing non-tourist activities such as cleaning, maintenance, and repairs on the boat. When alone and in remote areas like Vanuatu and parts of Indonesia, we are at the mercy of the locals and are lucky to get a more intimate glimpse into their lives. In places such as Tahiti, Bali, and here in Mauritius, we are just another pair of tourists and our experiences are not much different from those who are staying in the resorts and hotels.

Thus far, our sample of Mauritius has been lovely. Perhaps it is because we had a long passage across the Indian Ocean. Perhaps it’s because we were in mostly third world conditions since the end of May and a good part of Mauritius is quite first world. Perhaps it is because we are more than half way on our journey and so we are now heading toward home instead of away from it. Perhaps it is because Mauritius is indeed a truly lovely place. We will never know it fully, but some our sampling follows:

First of all, our marina is intimate. Until the Somali pirates caused many sailors to detour around Africa, not many sailboats came through Port Louis. A few charter boats reside here, but otherwise, it is unusually crowed now as we cruising boats gather here for the passage to South Africa. The ideal time for this passage is from mid-October to early November. So the local boat owners will probably breathe a sigh of relief when we we’re all merrily on our way west.

Mauritius is famous for its white beaches. Jon and I rented a car for two days and explored the western side of the island. I don’t know about the whole island, but yes, there are many beaches like this one along the western coast. This is one of the more famous spots around the town of Flic-en-Flac. Unlike many of the Pacific islands, here we find trees growing right up to the shorelines. According to one Creole man we met, the tourist season is down this year, no doubt due to the economic problems in Europe and elsewhere.

Preparing the net while managing the swells
In the small village of Tamarin, we came across these fishermen getting their rather long net organized. Seven or eight men were engaged in the task; this has been a constant throughout our sailing -- local fishermen working day-in and day-out either for catch to sell or to eat … while the port is filled with commercial boats hailing from China, Taiwan, and India, there's still a strong local fleet in these waters.

Filling the carrying bowls with raw sea sa
Inland from the beach, on the other side of the coastal road was a salt factory. Sea water is piped inland about 2000m, to a series of cascading pools, each lined with carved blocks of volcanic pavers. As the water is allowed to trickle downslope to its adjoining pool, it evaporates. Women in long blue skirts and white blouses shovel the increasingly-saline solutions to the edges of the pools, until, in the lowest pools, the salt crystals gather in piles, where they are loaded into blue perforated bowls (allowing the residual water to trickle out). Then, two to a head, the women carry the salt-filled bowls to a shed where the raw salt is bagged and shipped for final processing. It was hard not to notice that only women were doing this heavy, manual labor.

Carrying the salt bowls

Salt storage
Mauritius is a volcanic island and the black lava rock is also common. Where there is an outlying reef, the beaches tend to be a delightful white sand, making for some of the more beautiful beaches we have  ever seen; across the unprotected shorelines, the beaches are filled with lava boulders tumbling into the sea.

Jennifer, Mauritian beach

Jon, west coast Mauritius
On the northern tip of the island, a series of small outlying islands create hazardous conditions for ships, with reefs claiming more than a few wayward navigators.  It's called Cape Malheureux, "Cape Misfortune."  Perhaps that's why there's a charming, old little church there, so charming that it prohibits newlyweds from having their pictures taken there unless they've actually been married there.
Well, we weren't married there, but we're not in the picture, so I suppose we're still OK with God!


We expect to be here another week or so, doing some touring, some boat work, some provisioning, and some resting.  It's a big buffet we're sampling on this trip, and while we have missed many courses, our stomachs are filling up and we've managed to taste a lot of interesting places, including this gem of an island, Mauritius.

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Naptime -- Indian Ocean Passage -- Part 5


Yesterday morning, as the sun lifted above the mountains of Mauritius, we pulled into a tiny marina in Port Louis, after a 17 day passage from Cocos Keeling. I would not have said I was tense or anxious upon arrival, but then our self-awareness sometimes loses ground to any emotion that builds slowly.  Once our lines were secure, and our boat nestled in the company of 25 other vessels, many of which we’ve come to know as we’ve made our west, I felt a wave of relief pass through my body, a shivering of muscles and an upwelling of emotion as I realized we and our boat were safe.  It’s a sensation I’ve felt before after long passages, but it always comes as a surprise, this release of tension, the acceptance of the reality of tranquility.  The poet James Dickey once wrote of the lure of adventure being not the adrenaline high of riding the edge, but the post-adventure recollection of reliving the adventure, or feeling the release.  I think there’s some truth to that; there was never a particular moment while on this passage that I felt a sense of exhilaration, but, yesterday morning, surrounded by kindred spirits, I felt completely at peace, awash in a glow of accomplishment.

Looking back at the prior four posts of this 5-part chronicle of a passage, I was first struck by their length.  On shorter passages I’ve tried to keep the posts to 1000 words or so, but these last four posts were 2000 words – perhaps a reflection of the need to reach out, to connect as we sailed some pretty desolate parts of the world’s oceans.  So, apologies to those with normal attention spans.  I’ll keep this closing post mercifully short.

Our last few days were characterized by gentler winds, gentler seas, and gentler sailing.  We had the winds directly from astern, so we went on just our foresail, and for 30 glorious hours we had the softest of swells and a steady 15 knot breeze, so we went gliding along, barely aware we were moving.  Those days came as a welcome respite from the earlier poundings, and we were able to recharge our personal batteries under sunny days and starry nights. 

The day of our arrival, as midnight passed, the weather and ocean took one final opportunity to remind us of its power.  We approached Mauritius from the north, the logical and safe choice in any weather, but as we turned, the wind picked up to 25-30 knots, and the seas, now crammed into the much shallower waters surrounding any volcanic island, built quickly.  Worse, we were forced to turn south, into the short, steep waves, and we took a terrific pounding as we hurried southward, seeking the lee of the island.  For 4 hours or so, the boat’s bow lifted well out of the water every few seconds only to slam down hard as the waves passed underneath us.  We had not seen these kinds of conditions since leaving the Chesapeake bay, and later, leaving Beaufort, when in each case, the shallow waters combined with stiff winds to batter our little vessel.  I was momentarily depressed when I realized our southward course paralleled the upcoming rhumb line to South Africa, but then realized that deeper waters would create longer swells, swells we could comfortably ride up and down with the slamming.

Out little marina in Mauritius is filled with boats, nearly all of whom have made the same crossing from Indonesia and Australia.  Usually, sailors prize their privacy, anchoring out, careful not to come too close to either land or neighbors.  Here, in a reversal of the natural order of things, we are huddled together, like sparrows in a storm, giving each other figurative comfort and warmth.  It feels good to be attached to land, where we can walk to shops, internet, and restaurants, and it feels even better to be near our cruising friends.  But most of all, it feels great to be here after a difficult but not especially dangerous passage.  Next stop, Richards Bay, South Africa, but before that, of course, another passage that is likely to be more challenging than this just-completed passage.  We’ll spend the next few weeks resting up, re-connecting with our family and friends back home, tending to our boat, and visiting this lovely polyglot island.  Meanwhile, I’m still basking in the post-passage endorphin high, and embracing the ability to sleep more than 3-4 hours at a stretch.  In fact, I think it’s time for a nap.

Monday, October 3, 2011

We're In Mauritius

We arrived in Port Louis, Mauritius around 7 am this morning (October 3rd) after a 17 day passage that was mostly good, but had its moments. We are tied up to a Lagoon 50 in a lovely marina with a number of fellow cruisers we've met along the way over the last year and a half. We had wonderfully long (and hot) land showers and pizza for dinner. We'll write another post on our passage later, but we are really tired and are going to get some much needed sleep for now.