Rites of Passage

An out-of-order post, written after we passed through the doldrums about 10 days ago, and posted here in Barbados, where we arrived yesterday, safe and sound.  We spent today doing laundry, cleaning the boat, launching the dinghy, and look forward to 6 weeks of cruising the Windward and Leeward islands of the Caribbean.

More posts to follow, with pictures, as we sample the various islands.

*********

The large scale weather patterns on either side of the equatorial Atlantic Ocean are breathtakingly predictable, consistent, and timeless.  Heading north from South Africa, one moves ritually into the southeast trades, through the doldrums, or, as it is known by meteorologists, the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), and then into the northeast trades. Three distinct weather zones, each governed by the laws of physics: air moves from high pressure to low pressure; the earth's west-to-east rotation imparts a west-bound direction to north-bound air in the southern hemisphere and south-bound air in the northern hemisphere; and where competing southeast and northeast winds meet, at and near the equator, instability reigns.

Leaving the Cape of Good Hope, on a northbound passage, a sailing vessel will experience consistent southeast winds around and beyond the tiny islands of St. Helena and Ascension, as the crew skirts the edge of the massive year-round South Atlantic high pressure system, its counter-clockwise winds defining the weather.  These southeast trades blow consistently as one sails northwest toward Brazil and the Caribbean.  As one approaches the equator, the influence of the South Atlantic high begins to wane, but not before delivering a thousand miles or more of gentle following breezes.

This makes for lovely sailing, and so it was for us, leaving Cape Town and then St. Helena for Barbados, our now-chosen port of call in the Caribbean.  The mainsail of our catamaran, limited in its ability to extend perpendicularly from the boat's centerline by the two swept-back shrouds, is not especially suited for dead downwind sailing, so we deployed our two headsails - our genoa and the larger genaker - in a wing-and-wing arrangement, one on each side of the boat. We set the autopilot on a course dead downwind, and let the southeast trades push us along at about 5 knots, as the boat's stern lifted and surfed gently down the following seas with each passing swell. We're not especially fast under that sail configuration, but the boat is stable, it's very little work, and it's very comfortable.  Other boats our size are faster by a bit - maybe averaging 6+ knots, but we like the steady, effortless glide of our conservative approach.

We left St. Helena on a Tuesday, the 28th of February, and sailed merrily northwest, in a following wind for two weeks, rarely adjusting a sail, catching up on reading, listening to podcasts, doing some writing, and enjoying the isolation of our little corner of the planet.  Day in, day out, we sailed dead downwind, adjusting course a few degrees every day or so, rarely straying from the rhumb line, the direct course connecting our point of departure and the southern tip of Barbados, several thousand miles distant.  A gentle passage leg on the way to a distant landfall.

But eventually the winds diminished, blue skies turned cloudy, and our boat speed fell.  As with the thousands of ships and boats that have gone before us on this journey, we face the requisite and unavoidable crossing of the doldrums, with its windless days and nights, relentless gray skies and torrential rains.  A brief rain shower on March 11th, another on the 12th, and then, on the 13th of March, a few hours after crossing the equator for the second time on this circumnavigation, we enter the twilight zone of the doldrums as the wind falls silent, and the skies open up.

What's going on? Around the equator, where the southeast winds of the southern hemisphere meet the northeast winds of the northern hemisphere, confusion reigns inside the Kingdom of the Weather Gods.  Southern air flowing north meets northern air flowing south, resulting in a Mexican standoff, neither flow willing to cede, neither flow strong enough to prevail.  Without the wind-borne dissipation of the tropical ocean's evaporating moisture, humidity levels rise, clouds form, and eventually, the skies become too heavy and the rain begins to fall in great striated sheets.

These are the doldrums, the price mariners pay for the steadiness of the north- and southeast trade winds.  Little to no wind, hot, sultry weather, frequent squalls and thunderstorms - and perversely, the stronger the trade winds, the more severe the weather inside the doldrums.  For boats headed north, to London or New York , these windless conditions cruelly repeat themselves, usually absent the cooling rains, in the so-called Horse Latitudes, which lie beyond the northern edge of the northeast trades.  There, 18 and 19th century ships would drift for weeks on end, and the logs of these captains and crew talk of men going mad.  Navigators looked for signs that one or another of the competing weather systems would prevail, bringing wind and an end to the rains.  With no wind or waves to disperse the effluent, ships lay adrift amid vast stagnant islands of animal and human waste. Non-essential cargo would be jettisoned in an effort to lighten the boats.  Discipline became a problem.

 Apart from a doldrums-inspired brief obsession with computer solitaire, we are spared much of that scene, thankfully, and encountered no thunderstorms.  Rain, on the other hand, arrived in abundance. We motor across smooth seas, as rain cells, weaving drunkenly across the ocean, surround us with dark clouds and the constant threat of more rain.  One cell appears before us just a mile away, but slides away to the south, while another, barely visible a few minutes ago, re-appears just behind us, overtakes us, and pours thousands of gallons of warm, silky fresh water onto our decks and cockpit.  One day, we experience a near continuous succession of drenching rain showers, their combined precipitation reaching levels that we haven't seen since our last foray through the Pacific Ocean's ITCZ , on our way from Panama to the Galapagos, several years ago.

Over the course of several days, having motored under alternating engines to spread the wear and tear, we still have no wind, and it seems like we're never going to have a dry boat.  Humidity levels are so high that everything inside the boat glistens with a sheen of dampness; we can't keep our kitchen towels dry enough to wipe the countertops; the floor is slippery and the beautiful Persian rug bought by my brother and sister-in-law in Iran is so damp that we're worried about its stitching, about permanent mold spots.  These rugs are made for arid climates, not the persistent wetness of the tropics.

Unexpectedly, the skies clear and we have a day of brilliant sunshine, but still no wind, as if a truce had been engineered between the competing weather systems, or perhaps the sky had just run out of water.  Everything inside goes outside to dry off - the rug lies across the boom, the throw pillows on the cabin top, towels and clothing hanging from every line, our sheets laid out on the trampoline.  Blessed dryness - so, energized, we take some bleach and wipe clean the ceilings and corners of the interior.  If it doesn't rust on a boat, it molds, never more so than now, in these doldrums.  Vigilance is essential; prevention is everything. We tell ourselves that we must be through the doldrums, that the anticipated northeast trades are imminent, that soon we can start sailing again, turn the engines off, at last free of their unnatural noise and vibration.

But that night, the Weather Gods mock our optimism; they remind us of their dominion over this realm, and their rains return in an encore performance that puts their earlier display of precipitation to shame. We can hear them say, echoing the Crocodile Dundee line: "Rain?  That's no rain!  This is rain!!!"  It's as if the ocean is turned upside down.  Under a low featureless sky, the clouds gradually morph from vapors  to waterfalls, and thick long exclamation points of recycled ocean water pelt the boat, overflow our gutters, and run sheet-like down our windows and hulls.  The rain fills our mainsail cover so that it bulges with water, the water oozing out of the tiny pores of the canvas, bleeding more rain onto rain.

As night falls on our fourth night in the doldrums, our fuel tanks read one-third full - we've been motoring non-stop for nearly 90 hours, at the rate of 1.7 liters per hour, moving northwest at 4.7 knots, trying to punch through the northern edge of the ITCZ.  If we hadn't been blessed by the day of sunshine, our spirits would be as soggy as the weather; as it is, we're wondering whether we'll ever experience sun and wind again.

And then, under a drizzling sky, just before the waning quarter moon appears on the eastern horizon, a suggestion of wind from the north, and, to the west, a smudge of lighter sky, a patch where the refracted light of a long-gone sun reveals a break in the cloud bank.  Our hope springing ever eternal, we raise the main to catch the breeze, convincing ourselves that wishing will make it so, and we suffer through the clattering of our sail, as the boat rolls in the modest swell.  A new version of the Mexican standoff:  can the wind prevail over the swell? I'm reminded of the Tom Waits line: "My steak was so tough it attacked my coffee, which was far too weak to defend itself."

At first we motorsail, the thrust of our slowly-turning engine giving us enough of a push to keep the sails full, just barely.  Then the winds gradually increase, to 8 knots, then 10 knots, and the mist disappears.  Soon, we're ghosting forward at 4 knots under our sails alone, the first time in days our engines have had a real break.  Midnight comes, and the risen moon backlights a scrim of clouds in the east; fuzzy dots appear overhead as the light from distant stars penetrates the thinning humidity.  The wind picks up, the breeze steadying from the east-northeast.  Five knots of boat speed, and we can start to hear the schuss of our twin wakes converging on our stern.  Dawn arrives, the rising sun revealing the absence of low clouds, the absence of rain, the wind on our right cheek confirming what we now know to be true: we've passed through the doldrums, and are sailing again, our passage resumed. The North Atlantic's high, with its clockwise winds, now defines the weather: we're in the northeast trades.

Mid-morning, we're flying along at 7 knots, the wind a steady 15 knots on the starboard beam, our sails as full as our hearts.  We can expect these winds to hold, and perhaps strengthen, for the 10-12 days it will take us to reach Barbados.  It's a lovely point of sail for us, allowing us to fly both our main and our genoa, and we expect to make good time.  The seas fill with skittering flying fish; floating lines of yellow sagassum weed extend along the direction of the wind, like yard markers across our path; we begin to see the bluish transparent air sacs of Portuguese men of war, their ridges limned iridescent purple. We've crossed the equator, passed through the doldrums, and are now surrounded by the waters and marine life of the North Atlantic Ocean.

 We count our blessings; cruising friends just one hundred miles to the west of us endured nearly six days in the ITCZ, victims of its wandering nature as the competing wind systems of our two hemispheres vie for supremacy.  Then again, friends that passed this way a week before us had a short two-day crossing of the ITCZ, proving that even predictable weather patterns have their idiosyncrasies.  It doesn't matter; we're all sailing now, bound for different destinations.

As we continue to make our way northward, reflecting on the three distinct wind zones of the equatorial Atlantic Ocean - the southeast trades, the doldrums, and the northeast trades - we are reminded of why we are drawn to quixotic enterprises like sailing around the world.   We do so in part to remind ourselves of the scale and timelessness of natural forces, and to understand that any change in prevailing winds or our life's direction requires a period of transition, where it's frequently cloudy and wet, where progress stalls, and where the prognosis becomes uncertain.  We sail across oceans because we enjoy making sense of the vagaries of weather, and because we appreciate a sunny day amid the rain, and the winds after the calm.  We sail for the rites of passage and the promise of a landfall.

For all these and a hundred reasons more, we sail.

Henk

There's no two ways around it: this has been a long passage for us. As I write, we've been underway for 27 days, and we expect, given the anemic wind situation, to be at sea for another 2 or 3 days. We're more than ready to make landfall at Barbados, the eastern-most of the Caribbean islands, the only one not formed by volcanic activity, and the island closest to Africa. We're looking forward to anchoring, and sleeping through the night, without the groggy wake-up calls every four hours. The sight of another boat or two - any evidence of humankind - will also come as a welcome relief from the endless days of ocean blue and sky haze. It hasn't helped that the moon has been absent from the night sky these last ten days - the stars are distant, seem colder than when we started, and the deep darkness of the nights reinforces our sense of aloneness out here.

There's a dismal poetry to this endless procession of mornings, afternoons, evenings, and nights, skidding and sliding and surfing and stumbling across an ocean, through the doldrums, into the trade winds, marking legs of steady if unremarkable progress on a chart that spans Africa, South America, the Caribbean, Europe, and the United States on its single page. We've sailed across the bottom half of this chart, almost, and we're ready to put it away for awhile. But we have a few more days ... a few hundred more miles ... to go before we rest. The winds are sliding south of east, making it hard to keep both sails full while pointed to Barbados; we've had to point further north than we've liked, and today, we're ghosting along in less than 10 knots of wind, dead astern, the boat slipping through the water a just a few knots. If we had youngsters on board, we'd be inundated with "when are we going to get there" questions. As it is, the question rattles around, unspoken, in each of our heads, each of us unwilling to reveal our longing for landfall. It's been a long passage.

It's one thing to say, jauntily even, that we're sailing from St. Helena to Barbados; it's another thing to be at sea, on one's own, for four weeks. We're certainly not the first boat to make this passage. Others have made and will make voyages as long or longer. We recall our friend Tony, whom we met in Tahiti, where he related to us the story of his solo, non-stop circumnavigation - months and months at sea, alone. And we talk about our friend Henk, who is solo sailing his 26 foot Midget, Sogno D'Oro, around the world; he makes about 65 miles per day - about half the rate of our progress.

We first met Henk, the circumnavigating Dutchman, when he arrived in Durban, South Africa, after his 77-day passage from Darwin, Australia to Durban. Alone. Readers may recall our posts of Indian Ocean sailing - tough sledding for any size boat and any size crew, much less for a single-handed boat as small as Henk's. We hosted Henk for his arrival dinner in Durban, treating him to some nasi goring and cold beer. On this passage to the Caribbean, we've stayed in touch via the morning ham radio net, trading positions and weather conditions. The last few days have been tough for him; the winds are too light to power his self-steering rudder, so he's hand steering through the day and night, his tiny vessel rolling back and forth in the swells, his small sails flapping back and forth in the light breezes. He's got a few hundred miles to go to St. Martin, his next landfall, but he's not worried; he's got plenty of food and water, and has managed to catch a fish here and there.

He has reason to be happy; a few days ago, Henk crossed his outbound track of two years ago - thus completing his circumnavigation - and accepted the radio congratulations of his fellow sailors, many of whom are also in the final stages of their circumnavigations. He's a different breed, to be sure, and his cheery, matter-of-fact voice on the morning net brings a daily smile to our cabin. This morning, he reassured us, in the familiar Dutch-accented English of my childhood, that: "I've been in light winds before. The sun is shining, so this is no problem for me." We take inspiration from his beatific acceptance of the weather as it lies around him; we aspire to embrace our zephyr-like wind conditions with his equanimity. Most of all, we look forward to crossing our own outbound track in a few months, when we too can declare our circumnavigation complete, perhaps by echoing Joshua Slocum's adage: "Let what will happen, the voyage is now on record."

But we're a few months from that milestone, and it pays little to think that far ahead; we have a few hundred miles to sail on this leg, and safety and sanity demand that we concentrate on the conditions of the moment. The truth is, though, that concentration on the moment is not easy; it's been a long passage, and we're physically and psychically tired. We've done our best to stay busy, to stay distracted, to keep our bodies and minds active on an otherwise lethargic trip, but it's been a long passage.

We've read dozens of books, listened to dozens of podcasts. We've hosted a pod of dolphins, surfing off our bow, and a half-dozen pelagic birds, brown noddies, spent the night on our solar panels, resting from their daily flight. We've picked up dozens of stranded flying fish from our decks, and watched endless streams of sargassum weed floating in line with the wind. We've drafted blogs and we've discussed our plans for when we return to the States in July. We've rinsed the red dust of Africa, trade wind-borne across two thousand of miles of ocean, from our decks, our lines, and our sails. We've reefed and unreefed, raised and lowered, furled and unfurled our sails, matching our rig to the wind conditions. We've watched an entire lunar cycle, from waning crescent to waning crescent. We've seen a grand total of two other ships. We've baked bread, pizza, and cakes; we've barbecued, popped popcorn, and indulged ourselves with icy pops. We've played games of cribbage and worked on crossword puzzles together.

We've tended to boat chores, and rued the loss of our genaker halyard to chafe, even after we took care to check it regularly, and to reverse it on its turning sheaves mid-journey. We've jerry-rigged outhauls for our genoa, preventers for our main, and check the fluids in our engines regularly. We've sailed across the point where our southern latitude matched our western longitude, and we crossed the equator for the second time on this circumnavigation. We've managed through a few physical ailments, none serious, and we've managed near-daily showers on the back deck with fresh water rinses. We've kept the boat tidy, the decks clean, and our freezer full, adding a sailfish to the list of fish caught on our circumnavigation. We've made arrangements for our boat's safe storage in May, when we return home for our son's wedding, and we're keeping in touch with friends and family. All this and more, in a series of four-on, four-off watches, checking radar at nights, keeping each other company, scanning the horizon for ships and storm clouds, marking the steadily-increasing elevation of the northern constellations in the night sky. We see, for the first time in years, the north star, Polaris.

We've done our best to stay busy, to embrace this altogether pleasant passage - no squalls, no storms, no major equipment failures, steady winds -- but still, after all that and more, we find ourselves 350 miles from Barbados, wondering if we're ever gonna get there.

But of course we're gonna get there, we tell ourselves, and of course, we know that to be true. We'd like a few more knots of wind, a bit of a favorable current, and, truth be told, a seismic shift that moves the island of Barbados a bit closer to us. We'd like a regular dose of Henk's relentless optimism, to remember that we too have been in light winds before, that it's just a matter of time and patience to make any landfall, no matter how distant, no matter how measured one's progress.

So tomorrow, we'll reconnect with Henk, each of our boats a bit closer to its destination. We look forward to hearing his voice, and will again remind ourselves that "the sun is shining; this is no problem." Congratulations Henk, on your successful 2 year solo circumnavigation; your voyage is now on record, and we wish you fair winds, following seas, and sunny skies on your way back home to the Netherlands.

Are we there yet?

Silver Lining

Each night on a passage, as Jennifer and I exchange watch responsibilities, we uncoil a USB cable from atop our ham radio, run it upstairs to the laptop at the navigation desk, attach it, and double-click on the Airmail 3 icon on the tool bar at the bottom of the computer screen. A window pops open, indicating we're connected to the ham radio and the attached modem. After the blinking modem settles on a channel, we're connected to the outside world, conditions permitting. Aside from the Iridium phone at $1.25/minute, it's our only form of connection to our family, friends, and to weather reports. The ritual occurs each night we're on passage, if only to send off the compacted report of our daily position, our course and speed, and a short message conveying a qualitative sense of our condition. (You can track our position and read these reports by clicking on the links on the left-hand side of the blog; to summarize our condition: all is well on board.)

We also use the radio each morning in a scheduled "conference call" with cruisers also headed north and west, a daily check-in of positions, weather updates, progress reports, and highlights: birthdays, fish caught, etc. On rare occasions, on these cruisers' nets, we hear of boats in distress, as referenced in the last blog, when our German friends' boat was dismasted. By way of update, after a brief visit to French Guiana, they've jerry-rigged a sail, and are now motor-limping their way to Grenada for repairs.) These twice-daily connections are vital to Jennifer and me: on passages, we attend religiously to our nightly email connection and to our morning ham radio net, and we count the days until our treasured Sunday Iridium calls to our kids. Despite our isolation, we don't feel all alone out here, as long as conditions permit a connection.

We're not the only ones connecting. Tuning into the evening frequencies for our email and weather traffic, or the morning net frequencies, I'm struck by the almost whimsical medley of background sounds that emanate from the ham radio's scratchy speakers: clicks, whirs, chirps, hums, pulsating tones, the odd garbled word, maybe English but probably not, and last night, the unmistakable sound of a child's voice in some foreign language, echoing in our tiny cabin on a tiny boat here in the South Atlantic. Some of the sounds represent nature's glory - the crackle of electricity in towering thunderclouds; the static of solar storms. It's a mess up there.

There are radio waves, at every frequency, originating from all over this planet, continuously, arcing across continents, some striking atmospheric layers just dense enough, at just the right angle, so that the signal reflects back to earth. Some signals are absorbed by the atmosphere, the layers too dense, while other radio waves strike the atmosphere at too sharp an angle, and the waves pass into outer space, to travel outward from earth until their signal strength falls to undetectable levels. When the atmospheric conditions are just right, you can pull in signals from thousands of miles away, but the skies are mercurial. Some nights, we have a weak connection for email and weather; other mornings, we can hear a distant cruiser as if he's in the next cabin. It's all in the propagation, the weather, the atmospheric conditions, and the volume of competing traffic.

Humanity has evolved to produce a lot of electromagnetic energy - radio, TV, cell phone, microwave, satellite -- you name it, each source radiating energy and information in both digitized and analog form. Spinning the dial on our ham radio reveals dozens of digital and analog broadcasts, beeps from China, voices from South Africa, a mix of both from ships at sea. At home, Radio Shack sells radio scanners that pick up traffic among first responders; the baby monitor at your bed side sometimes gurgles with the sounds of a neighbor's feeding infant. We tune the dial to talk to our friends, and to hear from our family, but can't help transmitting our news to unintended recipients, and sometimes can't avoid overhearing the unexpected from an unintended source. The skies are noisy; propagation varies; signals come into and out of coherence.

As go radio waves, so go our lives. Each of us is constantly sending, receiving, and sorting information -- signal and noise -- trying to make sense of ourselves, the world and the people around us. For what are we if not nodes, on some grand network, each of us living within a complex array of relationships and transactions, sending messages, continuously filtering the incoming wheat from the chaff, deciding who and what to respond to, relishing the evening reunion with loved ones, dreading the midnight call from an emergency room? Being connected, sending and receiving, seems to define us as human beings, and it's no stretch to imagine us each as a full-time radio operator, dialing into agreed-upon channels, talking to our loved ones, rotating the dial to experience the essential, fighting off the static.

In a noisy world, we long for the pure connection of togetherness. It seems that to retain a sense of ourselves, we need to maintain relationships with others, as if by remaining connected, we can triangulate back to ourselves and thus define our position in the cosmos. But sometimes, as I'm discovering, this longing for connection comes at a price. Increasingly, our reliance on external channels, others' voices, has led to us ignoring -- or becoming unable to hear - the messages of our own creation, our own experiences, our internal channels. We're inundated by noise and signals originating from without; we hear everything outside ourselves, and meanwhile, the voice inside ourselves - the voice that asks "what voice?" - is drowned out, rendered silent, struck dumb.

My emerging awareness of our growing deafness to internal voices crystallized on this latest passage - our longest yet at an expected 30 days. We're pretty isolated out here, with watch schedules being what they are. To combat the isolation, every afternoon, we make sure to spend time together, engaged in boat chores, talking about the latest books we're reading, playing a game of Scrabble, the daily conversations and interactions of two life mates on a circumnavigation. Most days, these few hours together are enough - sometimes just enough - to stave off the inevitable feelings of isolation and loneliness.

But there's a lot of "alone" time, whether we like it or not - time when we're on our solo watches, when we're lying in our bunks just before falling asleep, or slumbering in the drowsy wakefulness of a sultry afternoon. During those hours of solitude, I've noticed that my time is often spent in the presence of of memory, encountering snippets of my life arising in the foreground of consciousness, the past returning, unsolicited, demanding attention. When the atmospheric conditions are just right, I experience vivid memories from dozens of years ago, whether I want to or not, unbidden, replaying conversations and witnessing scenes from my past.

It's as if my mind, unable to tune into others' transmissions and broadcasts, turns inward for stimulation, subconsciously scanning itself - exploring the intra-cranial transmissions and channels among and between my billions of neurons, and randomly selecting one or another discreet memory. Each resulting image, fully formed, cascades into preceding and succeeding images and recollections, until my scanner locks onto an event, an encounter. It's as if my skull is acting like the earth's atmosphere - its uneven propagation presenting some memories clearly, while others lay obscured by static, their specifics just out of reach. Even when conditions aren't exactly perfect, my mind's built-in receiver picks up memories of long-ago events.

This emergence of memory is not a new phenomenon; I've written on this earlier, but having spent 30 of the last 37 days at sea, it's clear that one of the most tangible differences between my pre-voyage life on land, and my life on a circumnavigating boat, has been the reality and impact of isolation. While incomparably distinct from the prisoner in solitary confinement, the absence of daily interaction with friends and family has been difficult for us. Even the most introverted person craves human contact, and for extroverts, isolation creates an especially painful environment. It's a profound challenge living on a boat in near-constant and near-total solitude, but if there is to be a silver lining in our chosen pastime, it might be this: without the daily stimulus of news reports, breakfast meetings, visits with friends, meals with family, and if the atmospheric conditions are just right, we are liberated to experience the continuous upwelling of memory.

For when our minds are deprived of - or freed from -- the assault of 'in-the-moment' stimuli, the emanations of our life's experiences are given the bandwidth to emerge anew, take fresh shape, and become fodder for reflection, insight, and self-knowledge. We've always known this: retreats, vows of silence, "quiet time alone," meditation -- these are all strategies designed to give ourselves the space and freedom to free our minds from the undifferentiated barrage of demands for our time and attention. On this, a long passage to the Caribbean, I have a lot of time to myself, time where memories flood forth, flickering, hovering, awaiting examination and context. It's not always a comfortable sensation, but when propagation conditions are right, I've found it impossible to turn the volume down on memory.

Disconcertingly, my stream of emerging memories seem biased to instances where I find reason to regret a behavior, a decision, a lack of attention to fact or feeling. My mind brings forth the painful memory: the lack of sympathy to a breaking heart; the intemperate word; the selfish focus on speed at the expense of togetherness. Sure -- with effort, I can consciously extract happy, self-validating memories, replay successes, create my own Top Ten lists, but if I yield to my subconscious, any life highlights zoom through my consciousness, barely noted, and their signals pass into space, local conditions too poor for reception.

No, memories borne of this isolation, the memories that remain trapped inside my personal atmosphere, those that come forth in the evenings after a long watch, tend to be the painful ones where honest retrospection reveals, as often as not, selfish, ignorant, or thoughtless behaviors. I find myself reliving these low-light moments during these alone moments, sometimes over and over as I fall asleep, as if some uncontrollable part of my brain is helplessly pushing the replay button. After re-living the harshly-edited and admittedly-skewed version of This Is My Life, my resulting emotions of regret and recrimination often linger well past the end of the episode, and often re-surface the following morning, or on torpid afternoons when the tropical heat threatens to suffocate us.

In this isolated space, I'm beginning to accept the regular emergence of my memory of this event or that episode in my life, and I now yield to my memory's implicit demand that I focus on this or that. Some nights, previously-reviewed memories return, suggesting there's more to be plumbed, that somehow I have yet to extract or divine the words I should have used that day long ago, the decision I should have made, the path I should have taken. Isolated from outside stimuli, hearing only my inner voices, I draw connections between one memory and the other, examine my behaviors, and often as not, experience regret, and sometimes, distill a lesson. I find myself hoping that I might be a bit wiser for the effort.

But then I'm back on watch, or the wind shifts or a sail change is required; dinner needs fixing; there are dishes to wash. It might be time for another ham radio connection, or a game of Scrabble. Conditions change, the propagation isn't what it was before. The specific memory fades back into the unconscious, any distilled wisdom seemingly lost amid the din of the boat's wake, the rush of the wind, the distractions of life. Is this how it goes? To pay the price of living through things twice, never seeing a benefit? I hope not, and it's not long before I'm once again alone, and the memories return. Weeks at sea, with hours spent alone, I've got plenty of time to listen to my inner channels, plenty of time to decipher their messages.

So we sail northwest, across an isolated ocean of memory. We sail through the invisible radio waves of digitized emails, radio-transmitted weather faxes, morning nets and weekly calls to our kids, bombarded by radio waves, the garbled accents of foreign tongues, the chatter of a small child, the static of solar flares. We stay connected to family and friends and to each other, under trying circumstances, knowing that our humanity depends on it. We struggle with our remoteness, the loneliness borne of distance, seclusion, and isolation. And through it all, I try to make sense of memories, memories that arrive, unsolicited and unscreened, in atmospheric conditions ideal for propagation, for reflection.

During these days of aloneness and longing, I've come to be thankful for the enforced and unrelenting solitude of an extended passage on a tiny vessel across a great ocean, for the silence that brings forth memory, for the quiet time that allows me to examine these memories, to turn them over, to extract and distill their embedded wisdom, and to do so again and again. I've come to realize that these cloudy confines of unnatural isolation hide a silver lining -- the uncovering of memory - and so I parse the signals; adjust my course; press onward.

The Gray Zone

Sitting behind our wheel, underneath a smudged cotton ball sky, I glance at the apparent wind indicator and see that the wind is blowing just about 5 degrees to the west of directly astern, as we sail northwestward to the Caribbean. I give the autopilot's tiny knob a slight spin to the right, hearing five clicks - one for each degree - and the twin rudders pivot and the boat adjusts its course to keep the wind dead behind. We've got both headsails out, the genoa flying on the starboard side of the boat, and the larger, lighter genaker flying on the port, and this configuration works only if the wind is directly behind us. We've maximized the sail surface area presented to the following wind, a light wind, one that's been blowing steadily at about 10-12 knots from the southeast for the last few days. We've had steady winds before, but usually they're stronger and rarely blow us directly toward our destination. These gentle following winds - with their lack of accompanying surface waves- push us along effortlessly, if slowly. With our wing-and-wing arrangement, we move west, toward the Brazilian coast and north, to the Caribbean, at just under 5 knots.

To the left of the instruments, a monitor displays a chart of the ocean waters we're sailing. As we sailed out of Jamestown, St. Helena, a few days ago, the screen glowed with the image of the receding land mass, and the contours of the deepening ocean bottom. We left the shallow waters of the island's cliff-lined coastline, and passed just north of the Bonaparte Seamount, a 12,000 foot spike jutting up from the seabed, whose tip lies just a few hundred feet below the surface. Now, a few days and several hundred miles northwest of the island, the chartplotter's display is bifurcated: on its southern image, contour lines and the now-tiny image of St. Helena; to the north, where we're headed, a featureless expanse of gray - no contour lines, no markings, no nothing. We're running out of chart data, a modern-day Columbus leaving the edge of the mapped world, and soon we'll be flying blind.

When I started sailing across oceans, charts were printed on paper, at varying levels of detail. For passages, we'd use small scale charts, covering large expanses of ocean. In a dry part of the boat, somewhere, there'd be a rolled up set of more detailed charts for use as we approached land. These days, paper charts have all been reduced to bits and bytes, images on a screen, recreated as digital charts. These e-charts are extremely functional: I can zoom in or out, and with each level of zoom, the level of detail changes, so that with a push of a button I can move from the big picture to the shoals of a narrow entrance to a tiny harbor. No more shuffling unwieldy paper charts, with their worn creases, eraser marks, and oft-times indistinct markings. But progress comes at a cost, and these electronic charts, while arguably cheaper than the full complement of paper charts whose data is digitally captured, still cost money.

So it was that we made the decision not to purchase the e-chart package for the eastern coast of Brazil and the adjoining South Atlantic waters. Hence, our chartplotter, lacking the digital data, has gone gray. Unlike Columbus though, I've got a backup plan to avoid sailing off the edge of the world. For a fraction of the price of the e-chart package, I bought a single small-scale paper chart to guide our daily progress, a chart produced by Brazil's Directorate of Hydrography and Marine Navigation titled "South Atlantic Ocean: South America to Africa." It lies, folded just so, on our table in the main salon. Its familiar color tones of yellow for land, white for deep water, and light blue for shallower waters remind me of my earlier sailing days. No detailed charts for the coastline, but that's OK, since we expect to remain hundreds of miles offshore.

I'm become a bit of a digital junkie, but I was raised analog, so this return to paper charts brings back memories of LORAN - the predecessor to GPS, of radio direction finders, of celestial navigation, of dead reckoning, of eyeball weather forecasts and, yes, of the anxieties surrounding landfalls when even the best of navigators might be off a few dozens of miles.

As I said, I embrace digital, but I was born analog. I have a Kindle, but I love my books; my Timex watch is digital, but our Weems and Plath chronometer has a sweep second hand to let me know exactly when to begin the 0800 UTC net on my ham radio. Our autopilot is linked to the uber-digital world of our GPS antennae, but our wind direction is a simple vane at the top of our mast. I'm comfortable switching back-and-forth, dials to numbers and back again, but now, with the entire chartplotter a featureless gray associated with "no data," it's become a bit disorienting to glance at the screen. Usually it's the mother lode of digital navigational chart data; now I see just a blank gray screen. Where I expect to see data reassuring me that we're in deep water, pointed in the right direction, avoiding reefs, islands, and shorelines, I now see nothing but gray, an expanse of nothingness, as if we're sailing on uncharted waters and could run aground at any minute.

It's enough to bring a few butterflies to an old school sailor's stomach, so I talk myself off the edge of the world by reassuring myself that Brazil's paper chart shows us sailing in about 12,000 feet of water, with the nearest land about 400 miles to the east - Ascension Island. Around me, by confirmation, the water is the deep marine blue of bottomless ocean, and a 360 degree scan of the horizon reveals nothing but water, water everywhere. We're OK, and even on the darkest night, well after the waxing moon has set in the west, my head convinces my heart that we're OK. But sailing through the gray zone got me thinking a bit about our increasing reliance on digital information arrayed on desktops, laptops, iPads and cell phones, collectively, our iScreens.

We've gotten used, in this digital age, to near-continuous reassurances that we're where we think we are, that we are no more than a few tweets or Facebook updates from knowing what's going on in the lives of our friends and loved ones, and that the ubiquitous nature of media updates guarantee that if we need to know something, we'll know it now. I read that a Virginian's tweet of the recent East Coast earthquake allowed a New York recipient to brace for the initial shock. People allow their iPads to transmit their location to a network of friends, and now there are apps that push content unique to your location - restaurant suggestions, retail opportunities - to your digital device. More and more, we're becoming dependent on what's on the iScreen in front of us. If it's not reducible to an iScreen, it doesn't seem to exist.

Back home, before we left, with a pair of computer screens on my desk and a Blackberry in my pocket, the Coleridge poem of the Ancient Mariner often rang true: "water water everywhere but not a drop to drink." Managing the 21st century's sea of data is the oft-described challenge of thriving in the digital age, and by my read of events back home since we left, it's ever more so today. Earthquakes and plane crashes aside, most of the chatter that flies across the ether and lands on our iScreens is little more than gossip, some of it salacious, some of it exploitable, and no doubt some of it interesting. Viewed from a ship at sea, though, I'm not sure how much of it needs to be delivered in a continuous stream of real-time updates to breathlessly-awaiting consumers. It seems like we create and tolerate a lot of clutter in our lives, making it well nigh impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff, to retain a focus on the essential.

In our own way, on ile de Grace, we too are immersed in a continuous floodtide of digital data, enveloped in its blanket of reassurance that if only we know what's happening, we're going to be fine. Compared to office-based land life, the data streams at sea seem far more manageable, limited to quantified metrics of the immediate natural world: depth, wind direction, boat speed. Our ham radio, an archetype for old-school communications, is also digital - its circuitry, and yes, even its attached modem - and allows us to send and receive emails to and from our shore-based family and friends, and to download weather forecasts. In our defense, these incoming and outgoing data streams are reasonably limited, and focused -- leaving us largely to our own devices and amusements, to our own reflections and recollections. As I've mentioned in earlier posts, we have been leading a rather clutter-free existence these past few years, freeing ourselves to experience and consider the random emanations of memory, paths taken and avoided, friends kept and lost, the intimacy of new lands and new cultures.

Undoubtedly, the use of digital instruments on a boat has made sailing safer, and easier, and more intuitive - at least for those raised in the digital age. I have friends who pointedly avoid using the new charting systems, choosing instead to lay out the paper charts, pull out the parallel rulers, squeeze brass dividers to plot a position and course, peer at the horizon for cloud-borne hints of changes in the weather. I'm sympathetic to this approach, and have paper charts, rulers, and dividers on board. I even have a sextant, which I pull out now and again to dust off the old skills of rocking an arc and calculating latitude, and I can tell by the evening sky whether it'll be a calm night or a rainy night (most times). It's important not to be solely reliant on battery-dependent electronics when you're all alone on a big ocean. Redundancy is a life saver, but even so, I'm glad for my chartplotter, GPS, and digitized communications capabilities.

However, it is important to recall that, even if surrounded by digital devices and analog backups, being on a boat at sea is still a risky venture. Because when the proverbial hits the rotating, you're pretty much on your own. Case in point: Some German friends of ours, who we had over for dinner in Cape Town, were the unexpected lead story on a recent morning ham radio cruisers' net, when it was reported they lost their mast 140 miles off the coast of French Guyana. They're OK, and they'll be OK, but I was struck that they were able to use their (digital) Iridium phone to call the German rescue service, who coordinated with French Guyana in case an at-sea rescue was needed (at last report, it wasn't); they were able to use their GPS to report their location to their fellow cruisers, using an Iridium-enabled email service; and they were able to provide, using their wind instruments, the precise weather conditions at the moment of dismasting. All well and good, and we all breathed a sigh of relief and murmured a prayer of thanks when we learned that all was well (at last report, they'll motor in to the nearest port).

But still. There they were, at 2:30 in the morning in 25 knot winds, and their mast topples in the water, a jumble of jagged and bent aluminum frames, steel cables, ropes, and Dacron cloth, just the two of them, working frantically to keep the mast from puncturing their hull, all while avoiding a potentially fatal entanglement in the confused mess of rigging. Their world suddenly got very analog, and no degree of digital data or digitized connection was going to help them in that moment. Thankfully, they are strong and experienced sailors, and they seem to have managed to live and sail another day. It could have been much worse.

Jennifer and I talked over our friends' ordeal, and re-lived, as best we could, the initial panic and then grim determination that surely characterized their emotions and actions that early moonless morning, and repeated a prayer for their safe landfall and speedy return to passage making. We can prefer the digital, keep charts as a backup, and reduce the clutter, but in the end, we're on our own out here, even if we feel (and are) safer for our communications capabilities and instruments- when they're not blanked out in a curtain of gray, that is.

So, when I'm not considering the structural stability of our mast, this gray zone continues to vex me: where are the curving contours lines of chasms and seamounts, the magenta outlines of fishing exclusion zones? Where's the nearest land in case we hit something, or, God forbid, lose a mast. For now, that information lies on the tabletop below, on the familiar thick paper of charts of yore, on the wonderfully old school Brazilian chart upon whose surface I now painstakingly inscribe our daily position, a penciled series of circled crosses gradually extending northwestward across a wide expanse of the "South Atlantic Ocean: South America to Africa." It's a(nother) big ocean, as I am fond of saying, and we're taking it one day at a time, under smudged white cloud skies, across blue waters, coming to peace with the emptiness of a featureless gray screen.