Passing Surprises

Our bedroom is at the back of the right - starboard - hull, and since Jennifer had the foresight to buy a real mattress for it, it's a very comfortable place to sleep. Until, of course, the waves and swells are coming from left-to-right, and the noise from the slapping of the waves against the inner hull as they pass under the boat can keep you awake. So it was that I found myself in the bedroom in the front of the left - port - hull, known locally as "Kate's Room," with its foam mattress, and spent my first night on the Arafura Sea trading softness for silence.

Heading east, the Arafura Sea begins at the Torres Strait, and its bottom contour reminds us that the land masses of Australia, Papua New Guinea, and Indonesia were once connected. As we entered the Sea, the depth sounded indicated 30 feet.. For the next 120 miles, as the north-south distance between the respective shores of the land masses expanded to several hundred miles, the bottom ever-so-gradually deepened, and this morning, we are sailing in 100 feet of water. Tomorrow, 120 miles west, it will be 150 feet deep. The next day, 300 miles from here, 200 feet deep.

Typically, after a day of sailing away from land, we find ourselves in water several thousands of feet deep. Throughout the Pacific, we sailed over waters tens of thousands of feet deep, so this Arafuran experience is a bit of a surprise, like sailing in a big bathtub. If you were to roll back time, over millions of years, you'd see thousands of square miles of flat, gently-sloping land settling and the sea waters rising to create this massive shallow sea. The shallow night waters are filled with fishing trawlers, dragging their nets across the bottom for shrimp., and laying miles of hooked lines for tuna and other surface swimmers. The shallow sea also means that waves and swells are more pronounced - and ocean currents stronger. There wasn't much wind, so we motored into a choppy sea with swells disproportionately steep and close together.

I was happy to crawl into the less-noisy forward bunk when my watch ended at 2 am. The first night on a passage is always an adjustment, as the body's circadian rhythms re-calibrate to the 4-on, 4-off evening watch schedules. Even the voyeuristic lure of Keith Richard's autobiography, Life, downloaded to our Kindle, couldn't keep me awake. Walk in, strip down, head on pillow, lights out.

But I did remember to ask Jennifer to wake me at 5 am or so, an hour early, to witness the total eclipse of the moon, cloud conditions permitting. Last year, we were in Tahiti to see a 99% eclipse of the sun - an amazing experience for both of us, and I didn't want to miss its celestial complement here in the Arafura Sea. Sure enough, after what seemed like seconds after laying my head down came the tap on the door and the gentle voice of my ship and life companion: "The clouds just cleared; it's getting darker."

I have written from time to time about the brilliant brightness of a full moon on an open, remote ocean, but need to remind the reader that for a few days each month, we can read by the light of a full moon, whose light also crowds out the star. Full moon = very few visible stars. Last night was no exception; on my watch, I was able to read the manual for our chartplotter - the display for our course and radar and other navigational information - by the moon's light, as I adjusted the radar to warn of approaching fishing boats. Only the brightest stars were, just barely, visible.

As a light sleeper - show me a sailor who isn't -- I wake easily, so after Jen's gentle wakeup call, I moved quickly to the helm station startled by a dark celestial dome of billions of stars that, a few short hours ago, were invisible. Hanging low in the western sky, just above a thin strip of dark clouds, lay a dimmed moon, its upper half smudged by what seemed like the thumb of God, reddish-brown and softened at the edges. Diametrically opposed to the moon, hidden by the earth, shone the still-invisible sun, its rays occluded by the intervening mass of the earth. Recipe for a total lunar eclipse? Take a long piece of string, attach one end to the sun, and the other to the moon, and pass the string through the center of this globe we call home. The night sky darkens and the stars emerge, and suddenly it's night like none other.

Unlike me and Jennifer, the gathering darkness in the lit night sky did not seem to interest the blue booby that surprised us by landing on our foredeck at dusk, its head tucked into its considerable body, sleeping (?) or perhaps just resting for another day of pelagic flight. A pair of boobys had circled our helm station at dusk, and one seemed to finally muster the courage to land for the night. They are big birds, with a broad wingspan and bulging breast muscles to keep them aloft for hours and hours at a time, swooping to snatch fish from the sea. Unmoved by the changing light conditions, the booby stayed asleep perhaps understanding that the darkening and the accompanying sudden appearance of stars and constellations represented no fundamental change in the universe - these stars and constellations are always in the sky - day and night, full moon or new moon. The moon was still there.. But to me, the smudged moon and the stars' sudden visibility reminded me that my perceptions are shaped by my position. Elsewhere on this globe, outside of the arc of the eclipse, the full moon shone brightly; what you see depends on where you are.

I watched the earth's shadow pass downward across the face of the moon, surprised at its lethargic motion. We circle the sun every 365 days, so the earth moves at a staggering 67,000 miles per hour. At that rate, surely the shadow should zoom across the moon - but no, we are talking major league distances here, where time seems slower. Galaxies take millions of years to slide into other galaxies, we're witnessing events today that occurred billions of years ago in the distant reaches of the universe, so what's so unusual about an earth shadow that oozes slowly down the face of a rocky, crater-strewn moon?

Celestial events play out slowly - a month or so ago, three planets were in close proximity in the dusk's eastern sky, and stayed in proximity for a few weeks. The sun, in its daily passage, hangs at it zenith for a few minutes - allowing sailors of yore to take accurate sextant fixes of their longitude. In fact, none of these events - galaxies, planets, our sun's movement - take any longer than they should ∑ the sun moves as quickly at its zenith as it does in its nightly race below the horizon ... it's our frame of reference that lends the illusion of speed, of slowness.

We left our homes, communities, jobs, and families about 18 months ago, and expect to return home in a year or so more. Sometimes this seems like a long time to be away from everything - we're missing out on family events, graduations, medical procedures, reunions, and the usual comings and goings. Employment prospects may be more limited than had we stayed in place. On melancholy days, we feel like we've been gone a long time, that we're missing out on many important events and opportunities, that life back home is passing us by. But here, on an overcast morning, with the blue booby finally flown off in search of food, and the horizon dotted with fishing boats, the memory of a sluggish lunar eclipse reminds me that time passes more slowly than we expect; change happens less quickly than we fear. The universe moves to its own time.

More generally, the solitude of oceans keeps me in this natural frame of reference, and I am at peace knowing that what I expect is not necessarily what I see, that what I see is not necessarily what I expect, and that what I expect or see is necessarily what I will experience. An hour after the eclipse, at the beginning of my morning watch, I woke up recalling the lunar eclipse - not as darkness, but as a red-smudged shadow sliding slowly down a darkening moon, moving at the same speed as the sun's edge always moves across our earth. Dawn, sunrise, morning, on to sunset and dusk of night.

I awoke to a rising sun, comforted in the way an ocean passage returns me to a pattern of natural rhythms, of gradually-sloping ancient sea bottoms, bringing me back to days when continents were joined, as waves and swells move smoothly underneath small vessels, underneath sea birds endlessly aloft, and the ever-present stars emerging momentarily from the transient darkness occasioned by three celestial bodies aligned for a brief moment.

This morning, I accept that we'll be getting home next summer and I'm reassured that things happen at their own pace, that we are always in the right place at the right time. Our families, friends, and communities will have changed, but not dramatically. We will have changed. We're all moving at the same rate as ever before. It's a big, slow universe we inhabit, filled with passing surprises that unfold exactly when and as they will.