Memory -- Indian Ocean Passage -- Part 1

We left Cocos Keeling around lunchtime on a Thursday, a leisurely morning spent mailing a package containing the now-replaced watermaker pump back to the dealer in Brisbane and some last minute internet connections. The sky was clear, the water turquoise, and we weighed anchor at the same time as our Irish friends, Fergus and Kay, slipped their anchor on their hand-built 39 foot steel sloop Pylades. The Alaskan boat, Second Wind, would soon follow after some last minute repairs to their autopilot. We eased out of the coral lagoon, raised sails, and turned north and then west to Mauritius, 2300 nautical miles across the Indian Ocean. The winds were less than we expected, as were the seas, and we debated increasing our sail area to maximize our speed, but decided to leave things be, against the possibility of winds freshening.

By evening, with Pylades well ahead of us, and Second Wind passing us to port, we re-considered our sail deployment, and shook a reef out of the wind, accelerating slightly in the evening breeze as a full moon rose behind us into a clear, star-filled sky. A delightfully low-key beginning to our longest two-person passage yet. Earlier in our circumnavigation, we had sailed the 3000 or so miles from Galapagos to the Marquesas, but then we had the pleasure of my brother Stephen and his wife Guita for company. No matter how much sailing you've done, passages take a toll on the mind and body, and the toll is eased with additional crew to share the watches and provide each other company and respite from the relentless wind, wave, and sky. Having a quiet first night on this long two-person passage was a blessing. The following day - Friday -- was more of the same: light winds, calm seas, and gentle sailing.

On Friday night, I had my normal 10pm to 2am watch, and, as is our custom, turned the radar on every half hour or so to check for ships and approaching weather. Our boat is equipped with something called AIS - Automatic Identification System - which receives location and course/speed information from transmitting vessels, said vessels to include, by maritime law, all cargo ships over a minimum length. Unfortunately, we discovered in Indonesia that many Indonesian vessels had yet to comply with the law, so we've gotten into the habit of trusting our AIS but verifying with our radar. That night, I was surprised to see a few rain clouds off to the southwest, headed our way. As readers may recall, rain has been a rare visitor to ile de Grace these past months, so I welcomed the short spritz of rain that evening.

For me, passages are something between a leap of faith into an unknown ocean, with unknown weather and sea conditions, and a competing belief that we'll just pick up where we left off on the prior passage, sailing in the same weather and sea conditions of the just-completed passage, no matter the interlude between the two passages. I suppose it's a reflection of my short attention span but I somehow assume, emotionally, that the wind, wave, and weather patterns of the prior passage will simply re-materialize on the current passage, even as I know, logically, that this is at best unlikely. It's as if my memory holds time in abeyance during the period my boat is in port - as if somehow the sea and sky outside the refuge go into freeze frame, unable to click to a new screen. Hence the decision to leave Cocos under-canvassed - after all, we came into this lovely atoll in stiff winds and strong seas, and surely, the weather would not have eased in the interim, would it?

Satuday morning, after the evening shower, I awoke to my 6am-10am watch and saw banks of clouds across the south and western horizons, and soon, the clouds darkened, swollen with rain and scuttling toward us, a harbinger of a windy and squally day. The winds began to pick up, from their 10-15 knot range of the prior day to 15-20 knots, and then, accompanied by driving rain, to 20-25 knots. We decided to practice a maneuver known as 'heaving-to,' whereby the sails and rudder of a boat are arranged so as to result in the boat bobbing quietly in the gathering seas, moving ever so gradually backward in the water so as to leave a smooth slick of water between the boat and the oncoming waves. It's the safest way to ride out heavy weather, and the combination of sail and rudder is different for each boat, so, with over 2000 rugged miles of ocean ahead of us, we thought it'd be good to practice. To our chagrin, we had another of those moments where the golfing practice of "mulligans" would have come in handy; we left our fishing line out, and, inevitably, it wrapped around our prop, leaving us reluctant to use the engines until we sorted things out down there. Of course the very conditions that led us to try the heaving-to maneuver, and, in our thoughtless haste, the line wrapping maneuver - gathering winds and seas - made it just about impossible for me to jump over the side and cut the line free. So we cut short our practice session, dropped our main to reflect winds that were now blowing 25-30 knots, and turned back on course.

For the rest of the day, we huddled inside, sheltered from the driving wind and rain. The seas were building steadily, and soon we were sliding up and down and across 12-15 foot waves, trough to peak. Our salon is surrounded by windows - too large to call portholes - and I was again able to see one of my favorite sights as the rain fell hard on a wind-whipped ocean. Between the squalls, with swells moving every which way, the wind-generated waves on top of the ocean create a mosaic of white foam tips, and wave peaks and curls, a swirling mass of sharp upward-jutting edges punctuating the surface of the undulating ocean. When the rains come, the force of the droplets tends to flatten these tips, peaks and curls, and the surface of the sea takes on a velvety sheen, resembling a vast billowing piece of sand-etched glass, an outsized version of those green and blue pieces of weathered glass my beachcombing grandmother would collect and glue carefully to glass globes in her Florida condo. I love watching the gusts pass over the waves, flattened as they are by the rain, and seeing the wind pressing down on the matte-grey water, its gusts visible as shifting gradations of texture on the silky pockmarked surface. It's a nice way to pass time on a rainy Saturday at sea.

The swell patterns in this part of the Indian Ocean are a far cry from well-ordered. On prior passages, in the Pacific especially, the trade wind-driven swell patterns produce sets of reasonably well-ordered waves that follow one after another, a vast corrugated ripple moving in synch, toward the west-north west, across a blue ocean. Here, a succession of west-to-east moving deep low pressure systems in the deep southern latitudes - the Roaring Forties, between the southern tips of the continents and Antarctica - create a pulsing set of swells moving northeastward into the waters of the southern Indian Ocean. These swell patterns build over several thousands of miles until they cross, at right angles, the northwestward moving swells driven by the SE trade winds. The result, experienced by sailors going back into the earliest days of sea travel, is a mightily confused ocean, with northeast-running swells colliding continuously with northwest-running swells. It's as if the ocean at these latitudes reflects the present tense of its immediate weather, the trades, and the lingering memory of its southerly weather, the lows of the Roaring Forties. Unlike this poor sailor, the ocean seems not to be challenged by living in the present, even as it remembers the past.

By today, Sunday, the squall-laden front has passed us by to the west and north, but the strong winds persist, as do the confused seas. It's been a day of boat body slams, as one swell grabs our stern and another slams our beam, and then one grabs our beam while the other slams our stern. For us, a catamaran headed west-southwest, these conditions are especially annoying, since our broad beam and dual hulls catch the northeastern swells square on, while the north westward running swells swing our generous stern back and forth like a car skidding down an icy hill. We swing left and right, even as we roll back and forth, and the resulting corkscrewing motion is tolerable but tiring.

As a result of these conditions, we've reduced sail considerably, since the last thing we want is an untoward combination of a swell and a gust turning us onto our side. Unlike monohulls, whose deep lead-heavy keels provide a righting moment to return a flattened hull to its upright position, the catamaran is designed to either float right-side up or upside down - heeling is not part of its repertoire. So in deference to our design, we have only a reefed Genoa out, and the boat is being pushed along (or pulled, as it were) at about 5.5 knots, a tidy pace but one unlikely to approach the 7.5 knot average we enjoyed on our passage to Cocos from Bali. Over a 2300 mile passage, the difference between the two averages is the difference between a 17.5 day passage and a 12.7 day passage. With more orderly seas, we could have more sail out, and a corresponding increase in speed.

One's mental outlook on sailing can be tipped crucially in the face of a passage that suddenly seems to have sprouted an extra 5 or so days. Despite the oft-described glamor or adventure of ocean sailing, I have moments when I consider the time at sea to be somehow wasted; days flow into nights into days, and the meditative repetitiveness I described in an earlier blog can also resemble a mechanical monotony of waking and sleeping, an oscillating state of mindless motion. In fact, one cruising adage describes sailing as periods of excruciating boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

Neither bored nor terrorized, the disconnect between my expectations of a repeat of the fast Bali-Cocos passage, and the actual sea conditions has nonetheless caused a measure of discomfort in my soul, one entirely of my own making as my memory tricked me into a false expectation. We expected a fast, smooth passage, but the ocean has another plan. Our logical minds understand that we can only control the sails, and not the weather, but our spirits lag in their adjustment to the sea-level realities. I'm slow and reluctant to adjust expectations, wishing against experience that the confused seas will organize themselves, permitting a more aggressive sailing posture.

So that's the other side of a passage - the leap of faith and the need to recalibrate expectations when the new passage's conditions do not, in fact, correspond with the prior passage's conditions. We're out here, three days into the trip, assimilating the likelihood that this trip will surely take longer than we had hoped for, and in fact, shame on us, than we had expected. I'll get over it, if only because I have to: reality always wins. But it's caused me to reflect on the role of memory in generating expectations. I have a short attention span, so I expect tomorrow to look like yesterday. But the ocean has its own way of marrying the past with the present, into the future we'll face tomorrow, and, out of sight and out of mind from a pair of sailors spending a quiet week in a picturesque coral atoll, the sea made its own plans for our wind and sea conditions. The lows in the Roaring Forties continued to develop, deepen, and roll eastward. The swell patterns moved north, and the seas here remain confused. Our memories are short; the sea never forgets. Something to remember.