Log Book -- Indian Ocean Passage -- Part 3

Early this morning, Saturday, the weather gave up its six and one-half day temper tantrum, and the winds and seas began to ease. Like any tantrum's return to normalcy, this recovery came in fits and starts, shoulders shaking, brief respites, diminishing cries and accusations. By sunrise, the winds calmed to a steady 20 knots or so, and the rolling white-capped swells that kept our cockpit continuously soaked with salty spray, and our decks skittering with flapping, washed-up flying fish, had settled down to a rumpled seascape.

Everything seems ready for a rest. The weather has been brisk and not dangerous in any sense - but it's fair to say that a near week of strong trade winds can challenge even the best boat and crew. Years ago, Joshua Slocum, in his legendary solo circumnavigation upon the tiny Spray, described these waters and winds as "rugged," an appellation that Beth Leonard, herself an experienced circumnavigator, relates in the context of Slocum's famous tendency to understatement. Of these waters, Slocum goes on to write, in his classic Sailing Alone Around the World: "I naturally tired of the never-ending motion of the sea, and above all, of the wetting I got whenever I showed myself on deck."

It was a tiring week for us as well, and we too missed the ability to be on deck, or, at worst, to keep the doors to our salon open. Direct sunshine and fresh, dry breezes do wonders for confined spirits on a small boat, and by last night, as the "books read" pile continued to grow, Jennifer and I confessed to each other our deepening desire to move on to the next part of our voyage. Of course the easing winds will call for sail changes, and perhaps slower speeds, but we hope to continue to make good progress neither too lean nor too fat, Jack Spratt!

Reviewing our ship's log, I confirmed the steadiness of the wind since last Saturday at around 2:00 pm, when it picked up to 30.3 knots and, then, continuously blowing hard until this Saturday morning at about 2:00 am. Over that 6 ∏ day period, as recorded in our log book at four-hour intervals coinciding with the changing of the watch, the wind speed hovered near-continuously between 24 and 28 knots, with only one or two brief variances. The log book is a fixture on any vessel, being the legal record of the boat's sea time, and it stands as the official record of any passage. Ours is a sturdy book of numbered pages, with each two-page facing spread hand-divided into a series of columns to record the vital statistics of our passages: date and time; latitude and longitude; course and speed over ground; barometric pressure; battery level; true wind direction and speed; and swell direction and height. On some trips, we also record the ocean temperature, to better understand currents.

We measure course over ground (COG), as opposed to what our compass reads, because the waves, winds and currents slip a boat sideways, so that we are often pointed in one direction, but, viewed from above, the boat moves at another, at an angle to our compass heading. We only care where we're going, net of this slippage, not where we're headed, thus the "over ground" element to course, as opposed to compass heading of the bow.. Likewise, we measure speed over ground (SOG) for the same reason; our speed through the water is interesting since it represents the impact of the water on the boat, but the water itself might be moving, like a canoe in a current, so we want to know how fast, net of current, we are moving along our COG. We also leave a small space for comments, but our log is not designed to be a diary of passing events. Instead, we record sail changes, mechanical issues, and short descriptors of the sea state. Looking back over the past week, I see frequent references to "bumpy," "confused," and "same same," that ubiquitous Vietnamese expression we picked up during our travels there earlier this year.

Our log, written in pencil which neither runs nor fades, began on April 25, 2008, when Jennifer took delivery of ile de Grace at its port of origin, La Rochelle, France, on the Bay of Biscay. From there, I can use the log to track her progress as she and three professional crew, including a very experienced captain, Larry Trow, sailed first to La Corona, Spain, then to the Azores and Bermuda, and then to our home port of Annapolis, MD, arriving June 4, 2008. On her maiden voyage, she sailed 4,360 miles over 32 days excluding rest stops and layovers. That's just about twice the distance from Cocos to Mauritius, a trip we now expect will take about 16 or 17 days - in each case, the boat averaged about 5.6 knots, consistent with our working assumption in estimating voyage times. There is a ritualistic component to updating our log, its carefully inscribed entries recording a new snapshot every four hours. Another line of data, another 20-30 miles of westing; a two-page facing spread is four days, another 500 miles. This passage we will add an additional 4-5 pages to our log, which already numbers 139 filled-in pages.

In reviewing our log entries for various passages we've made on this circumnavigation, my mind's eye can still fill in the blanks, recreating periods of dirge-like calms and the occasional adrenaline surges of a squally night or an untimely gear failure. Read carefully, logs re-create a journey, a fact that seemed to come as a surprise to a few unscrupulous sailors who have sought to fabricate transoceanic voyages through spurious entries into a fictitious log, only to have their stories fall apart upon close ex poste examination of their log books. One of the more famous of these occurred in the first solo sailing race around the world, when the log book of one of the participants was revealed to have been crafted to put forth the appearance of steady circumnavigational progress while he drifted, alone and apparently going mad, in the South Atlantic Ocean. His boat was found adrift, his so-called logbook on the navigator's table, and his body was never recovered.

Unlike land travel, with its movement along and past fixed objects - roads, cities, rivers, mountains -- moving across the earth's oceans is done with little reference to any recallable object. There are no buoys at sea, and no guideposts. The sailor and land traveler each have ports of call to be sure, but the sailor's time between ports lacks any unique, enduring reference points. For all intents and purposes, it's impossible to single out this set of swells, or those kinds of waves from any other set on any other part of any other ocean, so the sailor's journey becomes one of port-based transient experiences and sights. I used to take pictures of the sea on certain days, or weather conditions - a delirious sunset, an ominous funnel cloud or an especially dark and well-defined squall line - but the pictures, viewed years later, seemed hopelessly generic, useless in helping to recall a place and time, a state of mind, a perspective.

Conversely, a picture of a sunset along the highway from Boston to Providence immediately recalls to my mind the sense of possibility I felt at the time, headed to another college weekend of beach parties followed by a surreptitious night sleeping on Second Beach in Newport. Or the image, captured on a cheap camera, of the Rocky Mountains, appearing suddenly in our windshield, as my still-long-time close friend Mark and I crested the pass on Interstate 70, near the end of our December-January road trip from Pittsburgh - we were exhausted and exhilarated at the same time, and it was my first close-up glimpse of the mighty mountain range. The uniqueness of landscape - as opposed to the relative sameness of seascape - seems to facilitate a detailed association between place and feeling, associations nearly impossible for the blue water voyaging sailor.

Featureless but for its swells and waves, a vast flat plain of blue, its horizon painting a perfect circle with one's boat at its perfect center, the passing seascape of a vessel's voyage is, ultimately, defined simply and solely by the entries in the vessel's log book. From these figures -- wind speed, direction, swell, pressure, sea temperature -- I can faithfully recreate the visual attributes of any point along the voyage, but these attributes span a very limited range of possibilities. Choppy, swelly, calm, confused, etc. Unlike the breadth of landscape attributes, the narrow range of seascape attributes seem insufficient to re-create or trigger in the armchair traveler the mood, feeling, emotion, or state of mind attached to any single point on any particular passage. In the best of times, with all manner of mnemonic devices, my memory is shaky at best; recalling states of mind is a particular challenge, even passages as recent as our Bali to Cocos trip. It's as if my memory is erased shortly after arriving in a port, unable to recall the passage, the tape spliced to excise any recollections, my life and mind having taken a apparent hiatus of sorts for the periods between ports.

Hence, this post and the several preceding posts, an effort to capture the ineffable and otherwise un-recallable experiences of the passage portions of our circumnavigation. For our ports, I have the pictures of the people we've met, the places we've visited, the islands we've seen; jogged by these geographic specifics, I can recall the wonder of stepping on a deserted Tongan island, or the sense of accomplishment I felt arriving in Cairns, our Pacific crossing complete. For our passages, the figures in our log are necessary, but, for me, insufficient. It's hard to remember how I felt reaching the halfway point on our crossing to the Marquesas, or the quiet satisfaction of turning south, into the lee of Niue after a rough few days in fresh-gale conditions, or the sense of anxiety felt when, hove to the wind, I felt the massive swells slide underneath our tiny vessel just a few days ago.

I know myself well enough that these faint memories of passages will fade quickly, and I need more than my logbook to bring them back. To parse a cliché, our logbook might serve as the proof, but these words and essays are the pudding. As much as I love data, and it's been a struggle to resist the temptation to graph our boat speed as a function of wind strength, or to undertake a time series analysis of the relation between wind strength and swell height, I do know that it's memories I treasure and not facts. Put another way, well after we finish this journey, when it comes to the record of this circumnavigation, what will matter most will not be our boat log, but this web log. Dessert anyone?