Darkness and Light -- Indian Ocean Passage -- Part 4

There is a rhythm to our days at sea, driven in part by our watch schedules, in part by longer-lived natural phenomena.  With just the two of us on board, we divide the day into 6 watches of 4 hours each.  I have a hard time sleeping in the daylight, so Jennifer takes the 6pm-10pm and 2am-6am watches, alternating likewise during the day.  I have the single night watch, and it's there I note another major rhythm of a life at sea:  the 28-day progression of the moon through its phases, from full to waning to new to waxing, and then all over again.  This 28 day cycle is so timeless and powerful that it even seems linked to the human reproductive cycle, to harvests, and to the bloom of coral polyps in tropical reefs, relationships that leave me keenly aware that however much science has taught us, there remain deep mysteries in our universe.   The moon is new as we sail these waters, so the nights are pitch black, a dark so profound that I cannot even make out what I know to be the white spume of our wake, not 2 feet distant, as we part the waters with our hulls and rudders.  It's as if we sit in a dark closet in a dark room in a dark house. 

Or a deep cave.  Years ago, our family went caving in West Virginia - we engaged the head of the local spelunking society who took us to a cave he was just beginning to map out.  We drove to a church parking lot in a remote town, walked a few hundred yards to a tree in a field, donned our gear, and disappeared into a hole in the ground.  It was one of the more disorienting experiences of my life, and after stooping, crawling, and wading for an hour or so, headlights on and senses on full alert, we arrived in a moderately-sized cavern from which several tunnels diverged.  Our guide asked us to turn our headlights off, and we were thrust into darkness as I've never experienced. It took a conscious effort to remain calm, and only by reminding myself that no one was moving could I ease my fear of being left behind to find my own way out of the cave.  Our guide then demonstrated something that still leaves me mystified:  he gave us each a tiny candy, a breath mint, and asked us to chew it with our mouths open … a request to which, being entirely at his command, we immediately complied.  Amazingly, we each saw each other's mouths fill with sparkling glints of light, a kind of oral light show.  Later, he described the chemical phenomenon at play, a description that regrettably, I cannot call to mind even as the memory of those flashing lights remains vivid -- more for the darkness it implied than the magic of the chemistry.  How dark does it have to be to see breath mints emanate light?

Last night, in passing over watch responsibilities to Jennifer at 2 am, I turned off all the lights on the boat (we usually keep a light on inside for reading, etc.), and, as we careened through the steadily-building seas at a brisk 7.5 knots, beckoned her outside and together we turned our eyes toward the east, to the invisible churning sea behind us. Below us, in the wake of our tiny vessel, we watched a surreal scene of flashing blobs of light, some nearly a foot in diameter, each pulsing for a few seconds, each appearing and disappearing.  Readers of this blog may recall a prior posting on this phenomenon of bioluminescence, when an algae bloom in a Marquesan bay created a pointillist masterpiece of white drops of light, as we pulled our dripping dinghy oars through and across the water, each drip precipitating a speck of light that would appear and disappear in an instant.  More commonly, flecks of bioluminescence, excited by the passing of our hull through the water, often fill our wake with tiny blinks of light, like diamonds glinting.  But what Jennifer and I saw last night was markedly different than any display we've ever seen, and called to mind the startling scene in Avatar, where a  character is running across the jungle, and as its feet strike the ground, the ground bursts into light and then fades as the foot's impact wears off.  Last night's scene also reminded me of the science fiction film convention to use visibly pulsing auras of light to denote a higher intelligence, the water astern perhaps teeming with latent wisdom, brought into visible being by our boat's movement.

The lights we saw in our wake last night would first appear some perhaps 10 meters behind our boat, as if on a bizarre time delay switch … the boat passes, the light-generating material gathers its photons, and then, seconds later - a lifetime in these kinds of phenomena - it amasses enough energy to burst into a globe of light, pulsing circles and spheres, streaming lines of light, some measuring a foot in diameter or length, and glowing for several seconds before fading back into black.  Our wake, otherwise invisible in the black night of a new moon, was suddenly filled with these balls and streams of cool soft bluish-green light, materializing and fading continuously, a sort of moving punctuation point on our progress through the water. The glowballs cannot have been the product of a single creature; rather, microscopic bits of plankton must be firing off photons sympathetically to those in the immediate vicinity, a kind of collective behavior, if it can be called that.  We were left awestruck. We stood mesmerized by this unfolding display of nature's whimsical diversity - what evolutionary advantage could possibly obtain to this synchronized phenomenon? 

By the following morning, it seemed like we might have dreamed the entire event, were it not for each other's corroborative description.  Attribution to a dream is easier at sea, because one of the other interesting consequences of our 4-on, 4-off watch schedule is that we frequently find ourselves roused in the middle of a vivid dream, waking to the unwelcome sound of the alarm.  More often than not, one or the other of us will stagger into the main salon, having just woken, with a fantastically-detailed and improbable story or snippet of a dream. Our sleep comes in stages, and normally, the body awakes during a dream-free stage, but our watch schedules disrupt this normal pattern, and we often try and figure out the Freudian explanation for this or that dream.  But the glowing blobs were no dream, and I feel fortunate to have witnessed them as we sail this vast ocean.

After a few days of respite from the winds and the waves, days we spent cleaning the boat from its accumulated layers of salt, tidying up below, and enjoying a slam-free existence, the winds and waves are back, gathering strength.  The winds are blowing a steady 25-30 knots, the seas as confused as ever, and we've again reduced sail to a sliver of a genoa.  It's early Wednesday morning here in the Indian Ocean; the 600 foot long Pantanassa, a ship bound for Vishakhapatnam, India, is just past abeam,  and even though it passed us less than 2 miles away, it was disappearing behind the large deepening swells every 10 seconds or so.  I called him on the VHF, just to see if we were visible on his radar, and in a clipped Indian-British accent, he cheerfully informed me that he had nothing on his radar.  So much for our radar reflector, and thus the reason we stand watches even in these desolate latitudes.  We see a ship a day or so, it turns out … we're crossing or sailing alongside several shipping routes from the Cape of Good Hope to India, Singapore, Korea, and China.  As they say, a collision at sea can ruin your entire day, so we keep watch at nights, checking radar every half hour or so, peering above the cabin roof for lights, checking the chartplotter for AIS signals.  Mostly, we just sit amidst the impenetrable darkness of a moonless sky.

The sun also brings its own rhythm to our days; we try and keep our local time synched to the relevant time zone.  Strangely, Cocos Keeling established a 30 minute offset from the customary Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) +/- 'whole hour' format, so when it was 9 am in Bali, it was 7:30 am in Cocos Keeling.   It's hard enough tracking what time it is in DC and Denver, where our kids live, without having to add or subtract the 30 minutes … for some reason, Cocos time is the same as Rangoon, which also has adopted the 30 minute offset. On a passage, it works out to moving our clocks back an hour every 7 or 8 days. By the time we get to Mauritius, we will be GMT +4, so our mental math will be easier.  Since we crossed the Date Line many moons ago, we've been "catching up" to our kids … making it successively easier to connect via satellite phone, a call we make each Sunday, adding a weekly upbeat to the rhythm of our passage calendar. 

Governed in one way or another by these rhythms - watch schedules, lunar precessions, sunrise and sunset, time zone differences, our days take on a repetitive and languid rhythm of their own.  Jennifer gets her best sleep from 6 am to 10am, during which I fix myself breakfast and my daily dose of coffee; after she gets up and has some breakfast, we undertake the normal daily chores of a passage - any requisite sail changes, any repairs, some general clean up, etc.  The rest of the day we're both awake, reading, talking, listening to music, playing my guitar, and, conditions permitting, enjoying the sun and breeze and the schussing of our boat down and across the mostly following seas.  I usually end up cooking dinner as Jennifer naps prior to assuming the first night watch, and then the night passes in a series of radar checks, snacks, and the sleepily-turned pages of a book.  We're cooped up to be sure, on a small boat on a big ocean, but we have come to feel cozy, even when the weather keeps us inside for days on end.  This has been a long passage - just short of two weeks as I write this - and we each are looking forward to landfall and the unbroken sleep afforded by a secure anchorage.

This trip has taken a bit of a toll on us each - with an initial extended period of rough weather, mercifully broken by a few days of easier going, and now followed by a second, hopefully-shorter period of challenging sea and wind conditions.  We've also received several bits of sad news concerning the passing of friends, news which has left us shaken, again reminded of how far we are from many of the people that are closest to us. These reminders of mortality, our inability to share in the grief of their loved ones, and the often rough weather, have combined to make this a passage with an above-average dose of melancholy, even as we look forward to seeing other friends, Keith and Geert, join us in Mauritius for the sail across to South Africa.

Despite the crew's funk over the weather, the sad news, and the distance from friends in need, our boat has fared well; our decisions to keep her under-canvassed has cost us a bit of time, but has spared the boat and ourselves of the otherwise ensuing mechanical and emotional stresses.  "Go slow to go fast" is an adage I've often repeated to my business colleagues, and that seems to be the case here.  Another favorite adage of mine, "it's a marathon, not a sprint," also seems appropriate.

And after this passage, I might coin another adage, appropriate to those who move quickly through life, leaving friends behind, perhaps unaware of their importance:  "Look for the lights behind you."  The image of those glowing lights bobbing in the waters behind our boat is an image I will hold onto forever, each now representing a friend or loved one I left behind as we set sail around the world.  Some of those lights fell dark on this trip; I will miss them dearly.  Others will appear anew, as we sail onward, making more friends, but each light lost dims the world. 

Looking well ahead, to when we resume our shore lives, perhaps one of the insights gained on this voyage of the body and soul is that we need to check and see whether we create spheres of light as we move through our busy lives, and whether we tend to their fragile luminosity.   In this, we are spurred by the bright memory of those mysterious glowballs flashing and fading away in the dark seas, again reminded of the many unknowable mysteries on this big blue ball we call home.  For who dares to ignore these moments of water-borne magic, an ocean's unexpected display of nature's whimsy, the lights that glimmer and gleam behind each of us?