Humidity

On certain windless nights, like this one, the small weather station on the corner of our navigator's table indicates a humidity level approaching 100 percent. The air temperature in the cooler Indian Ocean is a seemingly-chilly 77 degrees, and at these lower temperatures, it doesn't take much to saturate the air hovering above the gently undulating pale green waters of this new ocean. It's our first time in - or, more accurately, on - the Indian Ocean, and our first day began with a gentle casting off from the concrete docks of Bali Marina, a morning glide out of the harbor and then the turn to the west-southwest, towards Cocos Keeling, Mauritius, and South Africa. The water temperature careened wildly between 72 and 82 degrees as we passed through upwellings associated with the strong south-setting current carrying water from the north side of the Indonesian archipelago to the Indian Ocean on its southern shores. The southern tip of Bali - far removed by distance and an isthmus from the tourist-laden streets and alleyways of Kuta, Sanur, and Denpasar - lay to our starboard, cliffs that are slowly being excavated and buttressed to support yet-more villas, hotels, and condominiums.

On these kinds of nights, with the decks and cushions saturated with salty dew, it's not that comfortable to sit outside - the dampness, and the chilly air, keep me inside the cabin where, in the intimacy of a boat and an ocean, the humidity is still high enough to leave the wooden floors slick with a thin layer of moisture. It's Friday, and we're headed west toward a setting waxing moon, motoring across a windless ocean. I had hoped it wouldn't be like this; the weather forecasts indicated winds from the east-southeast at about 15-20 knots, conditions that are perfect for our genaker, a large, light sail that pulls the boat nicely along in those kind of following winds. Instead, except for a brief period of southerly winds where our genaker-mainsail combination propelled us along at 6-7 knots, we've had nothing more than a whisper of wind from the southeast. One of the occupational hazards of tropical sailing is that the sub-tropical tradewinds sometimes die out near the equator, a victim of the competing offsetting coriolis forces that also prevent hurricanes from crossing the equator. I'm glad we have full fuel tanks as well as an extra 200 liters in jerry cans, but I wish we had wind.

We were happy to leave Bali and resume our passage-making; while we would have liked to have visited more of the mountainous interior of Bali, and its iconic Hindu cultural towns and shrines, we were ready to continue our westing. Jennifer's unexpected visit home and, a result of boat safety and security issues related to our boat in these Indonesian waters, my forced laying-in on ile de Grace, left us each eager to enter the dreamlike, meditative state of an ocean passage. In these eastern waters, having visited Thailand and Vietnam, and now Bali, we've picked up a few books on meditation, and one in particular highlighted the practical elements - find a comfortable place and position, empty your mind through concentration on breathing, and achieve a state of relaxation and tranquility. Sounds easy ... and it led me to reflect on the way in which extended voyages - especially those in relatively peaceful conditions -create for me conditions conducive to a period of extended meditation. In my case, it's being surrounded by a boat I trust, with a person I love, that together satisfy the first general requisite - place and position - and then, over the first few days, a gradual and unavoidable emptying of my mind from everything not related to the sea below me, the sky above me, and the boat around me. It's as elemental a concern, this act of seamanship, as breathing except on a larger scale as befits the circumstances of being alone on a lonely ocean. There are few distractions, and few opportunities to engage the rest of the world; I yield to the enormity of an oceanic expanse, and find myself quickly in a slightly-altered state of awareness, keenly connected to a mind free of outside intrusions, aware only of my next breath, the next swell, the approaching cloud bank.

Twenty months into our circumnavigation, I have begun to reflect on how this time away from friends, family, work, the trappings of a land-based, 5-day work, 2 day weekend life - how this adventure has and will have changed me. I confess to finding it difficult if not impossible to arrive at any reportable insights. I feel I am the same person that set sail from Annapolis .. but of course, that's not possible. I feel perhaps a victim of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle that an observer can measure either a particle's position or its path of motion, but not both simultaneously. I know I'm on a boat, sailing west, but in a metaphysical sense I don't know who I've become on this boat, nor where, again metaphysically speaking, I'm headed. In this, I am reminded my own experience as a parent: looking back on my two kids' development, I can draw a precise line from their infant and child behaviors to their present-day idiosyncrasies, preferences, tendencies, etc. ... but, of course, during their childhood,- and certainly today -- I had and have no idea where they might be headed or who or what they might become or achieve. Put another way, viewed retrospectively, we are, it seems, depressingly predictable. It's as if we are simultaneously following a pre-ordained path, plain only in retrospect, while simultaneously feeling as if we're making it up as we go along.

More personally, I can see clearly how I ended up here, on a boat dripping wet with Indian Ocean humidity, at a seemingly-inevitable point in space and time, reflecting on who and what I am, but I can't see where I'm headed. Or, I can see where I'm headed - back home to the States, to a job as yet-undefined and undiscovered, to my friends and family - but without any sense of how these experiences might have changed me once I get there. A related principle of physics is that the act of observing an event changes the event, and here, in a steadily-dampening cabin, motoring across an undulating black expanse of ocean, I am frustrated that my introspection on how this voyage might be changing me seems to run aground on the timeless principle that the observer cannot observe the observer; we cannot determine where we are, and simultaneously predict where we might be.

Perhaps all I can say is this: that this act of removing myself from zones of familiarity and comfort, from paths taken daily, from relationships and expectations that flow seamlessly one day to the next ... this act of disrupting irrevocably both my position and my path ... this voyage seems to offer me a the possibility of a new future, a future where I might enjoy the illusion, or perhaps, the reality, of consciously moving off any pre-ordained pathway, to a new, yet-to-be-arrived-at position, sailing a new, yet-to-be-defined course, where what I see, what I feel, and who I am will reflect a new perspective, even a new history, fashioned imperceptibly during this seagoing three-year voyage around our magnificent blue planet.