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.