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.