Rites of Passage

An out-of-order post, written after we passed through the doldrums about 10 days ago, and posted here in Barbados, where we arrived yesterday, safe and sound.  We spent today doing laundry, cleaning the boat, launching the dinghy, and look forward to 6 weeks of cruising the Windward and Leeward islands of the Caribbean.

More posts to follow, with pictures, as we sample the various islands.

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The large scale weather patterns on either side of the equatorial Atlantic Ocean are breathtakingly predictable, consistent, and timeless.  Heading north from South Africa, one moves ritually into the southeast trades, through the doldrums, or, as it is known by meteorologists, the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), and then into the northeast trades. Three distinct weather zones, each governed by the laws of physics: air moves from high pressure to low pressure; the earth's west-to-east rotation imparts a west-bound direction to north-bound air in the southern hemisphere and south-bound air in the northern hemisphere; and where competing southeast and northeast winds meet, at and near the equator, instability reigns.

Leaving the Cape of Good Hope, on a northbound passage, a sailing vessel will experience consistent southeast winds around and beyond the tiny islands of St. Helena and Ascension, as the crew skirts the edge of the massive year-round South Atlantic high pressure system, its counter-clockwise winds defining the weather.  These southeast trades blow consistently as one sails northwest toward Brazil and the Caribbean.  As one approaches the equator, the influence of the South Atlantic high begins to wane, but not before delivering a thousand miles or more of gentle following breezes.

This makes for lovely sailing, and so it was for us, leaving Cape Town and then St. Helena for Barbados, our now-chosen port of call in the Caribbean.  The mainsail of our catamaran, limited in its ability to extend perpendicularly from the boat's centerline by the two swept-back shrouds, is not especially suited for dead downwind sailing, so we deployed our two headsails - our genoa and the larger genaker - in a wing-and-wing arrangement, one on each side of the boat. We set the autopilot on a course dead downwind, and let the southeast trades push us along at about 5 knots, as the boat's stern lifted and surfed gently down the following seas with each passing swell. We're not especially fast under that sail configuration, but the boat is stable, it's very little work, and it's very comfortable.  Other boats our size are faster by a bit - maybe averaging 6+ knots, but we like the steady, effortless glide of our conservative approach.

We left St. Helena on a Tuesday, the 28th of February, and sailed merrily northwest, in a following wind for two weeks, rarely adjusting a sail, catching up on reading, listening to podcasts, doing some writing, and enjoying the isolation of our little corner of the planet.  Day in, day out, we sailed dead downwind, adjusting course a few degrees every day or so, rarely straying from the rhumb line, the direct course connecting our point of departure and the southern tip of Barbados, several thousand miles distant.  A gentle passage leg on the way to a distant landfall.

But eventually the winds diminished, blue skies turned cloudy, and our boat speed fell.  As with the thousands of ships and boats that have gone before us on this journey, we face the requisite and unavoidable crossing of the doldrums, with its windless days and nights, relentless gray skies and torrential rains.  A brief rain shower on March 11th, another on the 12th, and then, on the 13th of March, a few hours after crossing the equator for the second time on this circumnavigation, we enter the twilight zone of the doldrums as the wind falls silent, and the skies open up.

What's going on? Around the equator, where the southeast winds of the southern hemisphere meet the northeast winds of the northern hemisphere, confusion reigns inside the Kingdom of the Weather Gods.  Southern air flowing north meets northern air flowing south, resulting in a Mexican standoff, neither flow willing to cede, neither flow strong enough to prevail.  Without the wind-borne dissipation of the tropical ocean's evaporating moisture, humidity levels rise, clouds form, and eventually, the skies become too heavy and the rain begins to fall in great striated sheets.

These are the doldrums, the price mariners pay for the steadiness of the north- and southeast trade winds.  Little to no wind, hot, sultry weather, frequent squalls and thunderstorms - and perversely, the stronger the trade winds, the more severe the weather inside the doldrums.  For boats headed north, to London or New York , these windless conditions cruelly repeat themselves, usually absent the cooling rains, in the so-called Horse Latitudes, which lie beyond the northern edge of the northeast trades.  There, 18 and 19th century ships would drift for weeks on end, and the logs of these captains and crew talk of men going mad.  Navigators looked for signs that one or another of the competing weather systems would prevail, bringing wind and an end to the rains.  With no wind or waves to disperse the effluent, ships lay adrift amid vast stagnant islands of animal and human waste. Non-essential cargo would be jettisoned in an effort to lighten the boats.  Discipline became a problem.

 Apart from a doldrums-inspired brief obsession with computer solitaire, we are spared much of that scene, thankfully, and encountered no thunderstorms.  Rain, on the other hand, arrived in abundance. We motor across smooth seas, as rain cells, weaving drunkenly across the ocean, surround us with dark clouds and the constant threat of more rain.  One cell appears before us just a mile away, but slides away to the south, while another, barely visible a few minutes ago, re-appears just behind us, overtakes us, and pours thousands of gallons of warm, silky fresh water onto our decks and cockpit.  One day, we experience a near continuous succession of drenching rain showers, their combined precipitation reaching levels that we haven't seen since our last foray through the Pacific Ocean's ITCZ , on our way from Panama to the Galapagos, several years ago.

Over the course of several days, having motored under alternating engines to spread the wear and tear, we still have no wind, and it seems like we're never going to have a dry boat.  Humidity levels are so high that everything inside the boat glistens with a sheen of dampness; we can't keep our kitchen towels dry enough to wipe the countertops; the floor is slippery and the beautiful Persian rug bought by my brother and sister-in-law in Iran is so damp that we're worried about its stitching, about permanent mold spots.  These rugs are made for arid climates, not the persistent wetness of the tropics.

Unexpectedly, the skies clear and we have a day of brilliant sunshine, but still no wind, as if a truce had been engineered between the competing weather systems, or perhaps the sky had just run out of water.  Everything inside goes outside to dry off - the rug lies across the boom, the throw pillows on the cabin top, towels and clothing hanging from every line, our sheets laid out on the trampoline.  Blessed dryness - so, energized, we take some bleach and wipe clean the ceilings and corners of the interior.  If it doesn't rust on a boat, it molds, never more so than now, in these doldrums.  Vigilance is essential; prevention is everything. We tell ourselves that we must be through the doldrums, that the anticipated northeast trades are imminent, that soon we can start sailing again, turn the engines off, at last free of their unnatural noise and vibration.

But that night, the Weather Gods mock our optimism; they remind us of their dominion over this realm, and their rains return in an encore performance that puts their earlier display of precipitation to shame. We can hear them say, echoing the Crocodile Dundee line: "Rain?  That's no rain!  This is rain!!!"  It's as if the ocean is turned upside down.  Under a low featureless sky, the clouds gradually morph from vapors  to waterfalls, and thick long exclamation points of recycled ocean water pelt the boat, overflow our gutters, and run sheet-like down our windows and hulls.  The rain fills our mainsail cover so that it bulges with water, the water oozing out of the tiny pores of the canvas, bleeding more rain onto rain.

As night falls on our fourth night in the doldrums, our fuel tanks read one-third full - we've been motoring non-stop for nearly 90 hours, at the rate of 1.7 liters per hour, moving northwest at 4.7 knots, trying to punch through the northern edge of the ITCZ.  If we hadn't been blessed by the day of sunshine, our spirits would be as soggy as the weather; as it is, we're wondering whether we'll ever experience sun and wind again.

And then, under a drizzling sky, just before the waning quarter moon appears on the eastern horizon, a suggestion of wind from the north, and, to the west, a smudge of lighter sky, a patch where the refracted light of a long-gone sun reveals a break in the cloud bank.  Our hope springing ever eternal, we raise the main to catch the breeze, convincing ourselves that wishing will make it so, and we suffer through the clattering of our sail, as the boat rolls in the modest swell.  A new version of the Mexican standoff:  can the wind prevail over the swell? I'm reminded of the Tom Waits line: "My steak was so tough it attacked my coffee, which was far too weak to defend itself."

At first we motorsail, the thrust of our slowly-turning engine giving us enough of a push to keep the sails full, just barely.  Then the winds gradually increase, to 8 knots, then 10 knots, and the mist disappears.  Soon, we're ghosting forward at 4 knots under our sails alone, the first time in days our engines have had a real break.  Midnight comes, and the risen moon backlights a scrim of clouds in the east; fuzzy dots appear overhead as the light from distant stars penetrates the thinning humidity.  The wind picks up, the breeze steadying from the east-northeast.  Five knots of boat speed, and we can start to hear the schuss of our twin wakes converging on our stern.  Dawn arrives, the rising sun revealing the absence of low clouds, the absence of rain, the wind on our right cheek confirming what we now know to be true: we've passed through the doldrums, and are sailing again, our passage resumed. The North Atlantic's high, with its clockwise winds, now defines the weather: we're in the northeast trades.

Mid-morning, we're flying along at 7 knots, the wind a steady 15 knots on the starboard beam, our sails as full as our hearts.  We can expect these winds to hold, and perhaps strengthen, for the 10-12 days it will take us to reach Barbados.  It's a lovely point of sail for us, allowing us to fly both our main and our genoa, and we expect to make good time.  The seas fill with skittering flying fish; floating lines of yellow sagassum weed extend along the direction of the wind, like yard markers across our path; we begin to see the bluish transparent air sacs of Portuguese men of war, their ridges limned iridescent purple. We've crossed the equator, passed through the doldrums, and are now surrounded by the waters and marine life of the North Atlantic Ocean.

 We count our blessings; cruising friends just one hundred miles to the west of us endured nearly six days in the ITCZ, victims of its wandering nature as the competing wind systems of our two hemispheres vie for supremacy.  Then again, friends that passed this way a week before us had a short two-day crossing of the ITCZ, proving that even predictable weather patterns have their idiosyncrasies.  It doesn't matter; we're all sailing now, bound for different destinations.

As we continue to make our way northward, reflecting on the three distinct wind zones of the equatorial Atlantic Ocean - the southeast trades, the doldrums, and the northeast trades - we are reminded of why we are drawn to quixotic enterprises like sailing around the world.   We do so in part to remind ourselves of the scale and timelessness of natural forces, and to understand that any change in prevailing winds or our life's direction requires a period of transition, where it's frequently cloudy and wet, where progress stalls, and where the prognosis becomes uncertain.  We sail across oceans because we enjoy making sense of the vagaries of weather, and because we appreciate a sunny day amid the rain, and the winds after the calm.  We sail for the rites of passage and the promise of a landfall.

For all these and a hundred reasons more, we sail.

Henk

There's no two ways around it: this has been a long passage for us. As I write, we've been underway for 27 days, and we expect, given the anemic wind situation, to be at sea for another 2 or 3 days. We're more than ready to make landfall at Barbados, the eastern-most of the Caribbean islands, the only one not formed by volcanic activity, and the island closest to Africa. We're looking forward to anchoring, and sleeping through the night, without the groggy wake-up calls every four hours. The sight of another boat or two - any evidence of humankind - will also come as a welcome relief from the endless days of ocean blue and sky haze. It hasn't helped that the moon has been absent from the night sky these last ten days - the stars are distant, seem colder than when we started, and the deep darkness of the nights reinforces our sense of aloneness out here.

There's a dismal poetry to this endless procession of mornings, afternoons, evenings, and nights, skidding and sliding and surfing and stumbling across an ocean, through the doldrums, into the trade winds, marking legs of steady if unremarkable progress on a chart that spans Africa, South America, the Caribbean, Europe, and the United States on its single page. We've sailed across the bottom half of this chart, almost, and we're ready to put it away for awhile. But we have a few more days ... a few hundred more miles ... to go before we rest. The winds are sliding south of east, making it hard to keep both sails full while pointed to Barbados; we've had to point further north than we've liked, and today, we're ghosting along in less than 10 knots of wind, dead astern, the boat slipping through the water a just a few knots. If we had youngsters on board, we'd be inundated with "when are we going to get there" questions. As it is, the question rattles around, unspoken, in each of our heads, each of us unwilling to reveal our longing for landfall. It's been a long passage.

It's one thing to say, jauntily even, that we're sailing from St. Helena to Barbados; it's another thing to be at sea, on one's own, for four weeks. We're certainly not the first boat to make this passage. Others have made and will make voyages as long or longer. We recall our friend Tony, whom we met in Tahiti, where he related to us the story of his solo, non-stop circumnavigation - months and months at sea, alone. And we talk about our friend Henk, who is solo sailing his 26 foot Midget, Sogno D'Oro, around the world; he makes about 65 miles per day - about half the rate of our progress.

We first met Henk, the circumnavigating Dutchman, when he arrived in Durban, South Africa, after his 77-day passage from Darwin, Australia to Durban. Alone. Readers may recall our posts of Indian Ocean sailing - tough sledding for any size boat and any size crew, much less for a single-handed boat as small as Henk's. We hosted Henk for his arrival dinner in Durban, treating him to some nasi goring and cold beer. On this passage to the Caribbean, we've stayed in touch via the morning ham radio net, trading positions and weather conditions. The last few days have been tough for him; the winds are too light to power his self-steering rudder, so he's hand steering through the day and night, his tiny vessel rolling back and forth in the swells, his small sails flapping back and forth in the light breezes. He's got a few hundred miles to go to St. Martin, his next landfall, but he's not worried; he's got plenty of food and water, and has managed to catch a fish here and there.

He has reason to be happy; a few days ago, Henk crossed his outbound track of two years ago - thus completing his circumnavigation - and accepted the radio congratulations of his fellow sailors, many of whom are also in the final stages of their circumnavigations. He's a different breed, to be sure, and his cheery, matter-of-fact voice on the morning net brings a daily smile to our cabin. This morning, he reassured us, in the familiar Dutch-accented English of my childhood, that: "I've been in light winds before. The sun is shining, so this is no problem for me." We take inspiration from his beatific acceptance of the weather as it lies around him; we aspire to embrace our zephyr-like wind conditions with his equanimity. Most of all, we look forward to crossing our own outbound track in a few months, when we too can declare our circumnavigation complete, perhaps by echoing Joshua Slocum's adage: "Let what will happen, the voyage is now on record."

But we're a few months from that milestone, and it pays little to think that far ahead; we have a few hundred miles to sail on this leg, and safety and sanity demand that we concentrate on the conditions of the moment. The truth is, though, that concentration on the moment is not easy; it's been a long passage, and we're physically and psychically tired. We've done our best to stay busy, to stay distracted, to keep our bodies and minds active on an otherwise lethargic trip, but it's been a long passage.

We've read dozens of books, listened to dozens of podcasts. We've hosted a pod of dolphins, surfing off our bow, and a half-dozen pelagic birds, brown noddies, spent the night on our solar panels, resting from their daily flight. We've picked up dozens of stranded flying fish from our decks, and watched endless streams of sargassum weed floating in line with the wind. We've drafted blogs and we've discussed our plans for when we return to the States in July. We've rinsed the red dust of Africa, trade wind-borne across two thousand of miles of ocean, from our decks, our lines, and our sails. We've reefed and unreefed, raised and lowered, furled and unfurled our sails, matching our rig to the wind conditions. We've watched an entire lunar cycle, from waning crescent to waning crescent. We've seen a grand total of two other ships. We've baked bread, pizza, and cakes; we've barbecued, popped popcorn, and indulged ourselves with icy pops. We've played games of cribbage and worked on crossword puzzles together.

We've tended to boat chores, and rued the loss of our genaker halyard to chafe, even after we took care to check it regularly, and to reverse it on its turning sheaves mid-journey. We've jerry-rigged outhauls for our genoa, preventers for our main, and check the fluids in our engines regularly. We've sailed across the point where our southern latitude matched our western longitude, and we crossed the equator for the second time on this circumnavigation. We've managed through a few physical ailments, none serious, and we've managed near-daily showers on the back deck with fresh water rinses. We've kept the boat tidy, the decks clean, and our freezer full, adding a sailfish to the list of fish caught on our circumnavigation. We've made arrangements for our boat's safe storage in May, when we return home for our son's wedding, and we're keeping in touch with friends and family. All this and more, in a series of four-on, four-off watches, checking radar at nights, keeping each other company, scanning the horizon for ships and storm clouds, marking the steadily-increasing elevation of the northern constellations in the night sky. We see, for the first time in years, the north star, Polaris.

We've done our best to stay busy, to embrace this altogether pleasant passage - no squalls, no storms, no major equipment failures, steady winds -- but still, after all that and more, we find ourselves 350 miles from Barbados, wondering if we're ever gonna get there.

But of course we're gonna get there, we tell ourselves, and of course, we know that to be true. We'd like a few more knots of wind, a bit of a favorable current, and, truth be told, a seismic shift that moves the island of Barbados a bit closer to us. We'd like a regular dose of Henk's relentless optimism, to remember that we too have been in light winds before, that it's just a matter of time and patience to make any landfall, no matter how distant, no matter how measured one's progress.

So tomorrow, we'll reconnect with Henk, each of our boats a bit closer to its destination. We look forward to hearing his voice, and will again remind ourselves that "the sun is shining; this is no problem." Congratulations Henk, on your successful 2 year solo circumnavigation; your voyage is now on record, and we wish you fair winds, following seas, and sunny skies on your way back home to the Netherlands.

Are we there yet?

Silver Lining

Each night on a passage, as Jennifer and I exchange watch responsibilities, we uncoil a USB cable from atop our ham radio, run it upstairs to the laptop at the navigation desk, attach it, and double-click on the Airmail 3 icon on the tool bar at the bottom of the computer screen. A window pops open, indicating we're connected to the ham radio and the attached modem. After the blinking modem settles on a channel, we're connected to the outside world, conditions permitting. Aside from the Iridium phone at $1.25/minute, it's our only form of connection to our family, friends, and to weather reports. The ritual occurs each night we're on passage, if only to send off the compacted report of our daily position, our course and speed, and a short message conveying a qualitative sense of our condition. (You can track our position and read these reports by clicking on the links on the left-hand side of the blog; to summarize our condition: all is well on board.)

We also use the radio each morning in a scheduled "conference call" with cruisers also headed north and west, a daily check-in of positions, weather updates, progress reports, and highlights: birthdays, fish caught, etc. On rare occasions, on these cruisers' nets, we hear of boats in distress, as referenced in the last blog, when our German friends' boat was dismasted. By way of update, after a brief visit to French Guiana, they've jerry-rigged a sail, and are now motor-limping their way to Grenada for repairs.) These twice-daily connections are vital to Jennifer and me: on passages, we attend religiously to our nightly email connection and to our morning ham radio net, and we count the days until our treasured Sunday Iridium calls to our kids. Despite our isolation, we don't feel all alone out here, as long as conditions permit a connection.

We're not the only ones connecting. Tuning into the evening frequencies for our email and weather traffic, or the morning net frequencies, I'm struck by the almost whimsical medley of background sounds that emanate from the ham radio's scratchy speakers: clicks, whirs, chirps, hums, pulsating tones, the odd garbled word, maybe English but probably not, and last night, the unmistakable sound of a child's voice in some foreign language, echoing in our tiny cabin on a tiny boat here in the South Atlantic. Some of the sounds represent nature's glory - the crackle of electricity in towering thunderclouds; the static of solar storms. It's a mess up there.

There are radio waves, at every frequency, originating from all over this planet, continuously, arcing across continents, some striking atmospheric layers just dense enough, at just the right angle, so that the signal reflects back to earth. Some signals are absorbed by the atmosphere, the layers too dense, while other radio waves strike the atmosphere at too sharp an angle, and the waves pass into outer space, to travel outward from earth until their signal strength falls to undetectable levels. When the atmospheric conditions are just right, you can pull in signals from thousands of miles away, but the skies are mercurial. Some nights, we have a weak connection for email and weather; other mornings, we can hear a distant cruiser as if he's in the next cabin. It's all in the propagation, the weather, the atmospheric conditions, and the volume of competing traffic.

Humanity has evolved to produce a lot of electromagnetic energy - radio, TV, cell phone, microwave, satellite -- you name it, each source radiating energy and information in both digitized and analog form. Spinning the dial on our ham radio reveals dozens of digital and analog broadcasts, beeps from China, voices from South Africa, a mix of both from ships at sea. At home, Radio Shack sells radio scanners that pick up traffic among first responders; the baby monitor at your bed side sometimes gurgles with the sounds of a neighbor's feeding infant. We tune the dial to talk to our friends, and to hear from our family, but can't help transmitting our news to unintended recipients, and sometimes can't avoid overhearing the unexpected from an unintended source. The skies are noisy; propagation varies; signals come into and out of coherence.

As go radio waves, so go our lives. Each of us is constantly sending, receiving, and sorting information -- signal and noise -- trying to make sense of ourselves, the world and the people around us. For what are we if not nodes, on some grand network, each of us living within a complex array of relationships and transactions, sending messages, continuously filtering the incoming wheat from the chaff, deciding who and what to respond to, relishing the evening reunion with loved ones, dreading the midnight call from an emergency room? Being connected, sending and receiving, seems to define us as human beings, and it's no stretch to imagine us each as a full-time radio operator, dialing into agreed-upon channels, talking to our loved ones, rotating the dial to experience the essential, fighting off the static.

In a noisy world, we long for the pure connection of togetherness. It seems that to retain a sense of ourselves, we need to maintain relationships with others, as if by remaining connected, we can triangulate back to ourselves and thus define our position in the cosmos. But sometimes, as I'm discovering, this longing for connection comes at a price. Increasingly, our reliance on external channels, others' voices, has led to us ignoring -- or becoming unable to hear - the messages of our own creation, our own experiences, our internal channels. We're inundated by noise and signals originating from without; we hear everything outside ourselves, and meanwhile, the voice inside ourselves - the voice that asks "what voice?" - is drowned out, rendered silent, struck dumb.

My emerging awareness of our growing deafness to internal voices crystallized on this latest passage - our longest yet at an expected 30 days. We're pretty isolated out here, with watch schedules being what they are. To combat the isolation, every afternoon, we make sure to spend time together, engaged in boat chores, talking about the latest books we're reading, playing a game of Scrabble, the daily conversations and interactions of two life mates on a circumnavigation. Most days, these few hours together are enough - sometimes just enough - to stave off the inevitable feelings of isolation and loneliness.

But there's a lot of "alone" time, whether we like it or not - time when we're on our solo watches, when we're lying in our bunks just before falling asleep, or slumbering in the drowsy wakefulness of a sultry afternoon. During those hours of solitude, I've noticed that my time is often spent in the presence of of memory, encountering snippets of my life arising in the foreground of consciousness, the past returning, unsolicited, demanding attention. When the atmospheric conditions are just right, I experience vivid memories from dozens of years ago, whether I want to or not, unbidden, replaying conversations and witnessing scenes from my past.

It's as if my mind, unable to tune into others' transmissions and broadcasts, turns inward for stimulation, subconsciously scanning itself - exploring the intra-cranial transmissions and channels among and between my billions of neurons, and randomly selecting one or another discreet memory. Each resulting image, fully formed, cascades into preceding and succeeding images and recollections, until my scanner locks onto an event, an encounter. It's as if my skull is acting like the earth's atmosphere - its uneven propagation presenting some memories clearly, while others lay obscured by static, their specifics just out of reach. Even when conditions aren't exactly perfect, my mind's built-in receiver picks up memories of long-ago events.

This emergence of memory is not a new phenomenon; I've written on this earlier, but having spent 30 of the last 37 days at sea, it's clear that one of the most tangible differences between my pre-voyage life on land, and my life on a circumnavigating boat, has been the reality and impact of isolation. While incomparably distinct from the prisoner in solitary confinement, the absence of daily interaction with friends and family has been difficult for us. Even the most introverted person craves human contact, and for extroverts, isolation creates an especially painful environment. It's a profound challenge living on a boat in near-constant and near-total solitude, but if there is to be a silver lining in our chosen pastime, it might be this: without the daily stimulus of news reports, breakfast meetings, visits with friends, meals with family, and if the atmospheric conditions are just right, we are liberated to experience the continuous upwelling of memory.

For when our minds are deprived of - or freed from -- the assault of 'in-the-moment' stimuli, the emanations of our life's experiences are given the bandwidth to emerge anew, take fresh shape, and become fodder for reflection, insight, and self-knowledge. We've always known this: retreats, vows of silence, "quiet time alone," meditation -- these are all strategies designed to give ourselves the space and freedom to free our minds from the undifferentiated barrage of demands for our time and attention. On this, a long passage to the Caribbean, I have a lot of time to myself, time where memories flood forth, flickering, hovering, awaiting examination and context. It's not always a comfortable sensation, but when propagation conditions are right, I've found it impossible to turn the volume down on memory.

Disconcertingly, my stream of emerging memories seem biased to instances where I find reason to regret a behavior, a decision, a lack of attention to fact or feeling. My mind brings forth the painful memory: the lack of sympathy to a breaking heart; the intemperate word; the selfish focus on speed at the expense of togetherness. Sure -- with effort, I can consciously extract happy, self-validating memories, replay successes, create my own Top Ten lists, but if I yield to my subconscious, any life highlights zoom through my consciousness, barely noted, and their signals pass into space, local conditions too poor for reception.

No, memories borne of this isolation, the memories that remain trapped inside my personal atmosphere, those that come forth in the evenings after a long watch, tend to be the painful ones where honest retrospection reveals, as often as not, selfish, ignorant, or thoughtless behaviors. I find myself reliving these low-light moments during these alone moments, sometimes over and over as I fall asleep, as if some uncontrollable part of my brain is helplessly pushing the replay button. After re-living the harshly-edited and admittedly-skewed version of This Is My Life, my resulting emotions of regret and recrimination often linger well past the end of the episode, and often re-surface the following morning, or on torpid afternoons when the tropical heat threatens to suffocate us.

In this isolated space, I'm beginning to accept the regular emergence of my memory of this event or that episode in my life, and I now yield to my memory's implicit demand that I focus on this or that. Some nights, previously-reviewed memories return, suggesting there's more to be plumbed, that somehow I have yet to extract or divine the words I should have used that day long ago, the decision I should have made, the path I should have taken. Isolated from outside stimuli, hearing only my inner voices, I draw connections between one memory and the other, examine my behaviors, and often as not, experience regret, and sometimes, distill a lesson. I find myself hoping that I might be a bit wiser for the effort.

But then I'm back on watch, or the wind shifts or a sail change is required; dinner needs fixing; there are dishes to wash. It might be time for another ham radio connection, or a game of Scrabble. Conditions change, the propagation isn't what it was before. The specific memory fades back into the unconscious, any distilled wisdom seemingly lost amid the din of the boat's wake, the rush of the wind, the distractions of life. Is this how it goes? To pay the price of living through things twice, never seeing a benefit? I hope not, and it's not long before I'm once again alone, and the memories return. Weeks at sea, with hours spent alone, I've got plenty of time to listen to my inner channels, plenty of time to decipher their messages.

So we sail northwest, across an isolated ocean of memory. We sail through the invisible radio waves of digitized emails, radio-transmitted weather faxes, morning nets and weekly calls to our kids, bombarded by radio waves, the garbled accents of foreign tongues, the chatter of a small child, the static of solar flares. We stay connected to family and friends and to each other, under trying circumstances, knowing that our humanity depends on it. We struggle with our remoteness, the loneliness borne of distance, seclusion, and isolation. And through it all, I try to make sense of memories, memories that arrive, unsolicited and unscreened, in atmospheric conditions ideal for propagation, for reflection.

During these days of aloneness and longing, I've come to be thankful for the enforced and unrelenting solitude of an extended passage on a tiny vessel across a great ocean, for the silence that brings forth memory, for the quiet time that allows me to examine these memories, to turn them over, to extract and distill their embedded wisdom, and to do so again and again. I've come to realize that these cloudy confines of unnatural isolation hide a silver lining -- the uncovering of memory - and so I parse the signals; adjust my course; press onward.

The Gray Zone

Sitting behind our wheel, underneath a smudged cotton ball sky, I glance at the apparent wind indicator and see that the wind is blowing just about 5 degrees to the west of directly astern, as we sail northwestward to the Caribbean. I give the autopilot's tiny knob a slight spin to the right, hearing five clicks - one for each degree - and the twin rudders pivot and the boat adjusts its course to keep the wind dead behind. We've got both headsails out, the genoa flying on the starboard side of the boat, and the larger, lighter genaker flying on the port, and this configuration works only if the wind is directly behind us. We've maximized the sail surface area presented to the following wind, a light wind, one that's been blowing steadily at about 10-12 knots from the southeast for the last few days. We've had steady winds before, but usually they're stronger and rarely blow us directly toward our destination. These gentle following winds - with their lack of accompanying surface waves- push us along effortlessly, if slowly. With our wing-and-wing arrangement, we move west, toward the Brazilian coast and north, to the Caribbean, at just under 5 knots.

To the left of the instruments, a monitor displays a chart of the ocean waters we're sailing. As we sailed out of Jamestown, St. Helena, a few days ago, the screen glowed with the image of the receding land mass, and the contours of the deepening ocean bottom. We left the shallow waters of the island's cliff-lined coastline, and passed just north of the Bonaparte Seamount, a 12,000 foot spike jutting up from the seabed, whose tip lies just a few hundred feet below the surface. Now, a few days and several hundred miles northwest of the island, the chartplotter's display is bifurcated: on its southern image, contour lines and the now-tiny image of St. Helena; to the north, where we're headed, a featureless expanse of gray - no contour lines, no markings, no nothing. We're running out of chart data, a modern-day Columbus leaving the edge of the mapped world, and soon we'll be flying blind.

When I started sailing across oceans, charts were printed on paper, at varying levels of detail. For passages, we'd use small scale charts, covering large expanses of ocean. In a dry part of the boat, somewhere, there'd be a rolled up set of more detailed charts for use as we approached land. These days, paper charts have all been reduced to bits and bytes, images on a screen, recreated as digital charts. These e-charts are extremely functional: I can zoom in or out, and with each level of zoom, the level of detail changes, so that with a push of a button I can move from the big picture to the shoals of a narrow entrance to a tiny harbor. No more shuffling unwieldy paper charts, with their worn creases, eraser marks, and oft-times indistinct markings. But progress comes at a cost, and these electronic charts, while arguably cheaper than the full complement of paper charts whose data is digitally captured, still cost money.

So it was that we made the decision not to purchase the e-chart package for the eastern coast of Brazil and the adjoining South Atlantic waters. Hence, our chartplotter, lacking the digital data, has gone gray. Unlike Columbus though, I've got a backup plan to avoid sailing off the edge of the world. For a fraction of the price of the e-chart package, I bought a single small-scale paper chart to guide our daily progress, a chart produced by Brazil's Directorate of Hydrography and Marine Navigation titled "South Atlantic Ocean: South America to Africa." It lies, folded just so, on our table in the main salon. Its familiar color tones of yellow for land, white for deep water, and light blue for shallower waters remind me of my earlier sailing days. No detailed charts for the coastline, but that's OK, since we expect to remain hundreds of miles offshore.

I'm become a bit of a digital junkie, but I was raised analog, so this return to paper charts brings back memories of LORAN - the predecessor to GPS, of radio direction finders, of celestial navigation, of dead reckoning, of eyeball weather forecasts and, yes, of the anxieties surrounding landfalls when even the best of navigators might be off a few dozens of miles.

As I said, I embrace digital, but I was born analog. I have a Kindle, but I love my books; my Timex watch is digital, but our Weems and Plath chronometer has a sweep second hand to let me know exactly when to begin the 0800 UTC net on my ham radio. Our autopilot is linked to the uber-digital world of our GPS antennae, but our wind direction is a simple vane at the top of our mast. I'm comfortable switching back-and-forth, dials to numbers and back again, but now, with the entire chartplotter a featureless gray associated with "no data," it's become a bit disorienting to glance at the screen. Usually it's the mother lode of digital navigational chart data; now I see just a blank gray screen. Where I expect to see data reassuring me that we're in deep water, pointed in the right direction, avoiding reefs, islands, and shorelines, I now see nothing but gray, an expanse of nothingness, as if we're sailing on uncharted waters and could run aground at any minute.

It's enough to bring a few butterflies to an old school sailor's stomach, so I talk myself off the edge of the world by reassuring myself that Brazil's paper chart shows us sailing in about 12,000 feet of water, with the nearest land about 400 miles to the east - Ascension Island. Around me, by confirmation, the water is the deep marine blue of bottomless ocean, and a 360 degree scan of the horizon reveals nothing but water, water everywhere. We're OK, and even on the darkest night, well after the waxing moon has set in the west, my head convinces my heart that we're OK. But sailing through the gray zone got me thinking a bit about our increasing reliance on digital information arrayed on desktops, laptops, iPads and cell phones, collectively, our iScreens.

We've gotten used, in this digital age, to near-continuous reassurances that we're where we think we are, that we are no more than a few tweets or Facebook updates from knowing what's going on in the lives of our friends and loved ones, and that the ubiquitous nature of media updates guarantee that if we need to know something, we'll know it now. I read that a Virginian's tweet of the recent East Coast earthquake allowed a New York recipient to brace for the initial shock. People allow their iPads to transmit their location to a network of friends, and now there are apps that push content unique to your location - restaurant suggestions, retail opportunities - to your digital device. More and more, we're becoming dependent on what's on the iScreen in front of us. If it's not reducible to an iScreen, it doesn't seem to exist.

Back home, before we left, with a pair of computer screens on my desk and a Blackberry in my pocket, the Coleridge poem of the Ancient Mariner often rang true: "water water everywhere but not a drop to drink." Managing the 21st century's sea of data is the oft-described challenge of thriving in the digital age, and by my read of events back home since we left, it's ever more so today. Earthquakes and plane crashes aside, most of the chatter that flies across the ether and lands on our iScreens is little more than gossip, some of it salacious, some of it exploitable, and no doubt some of it interesting. Viewed from a ship at sea, though, I'm not sure how much of it needs to be delivered in a continuous stream of real-time updates to breathlessly-awaiting consumers. It seems like we create and tolerate a lot of clutter in our lives, making it well nigh impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff, to retain a focus on the essential.

In our own way, on ile de Grace, we too are immersed in a continuous floodtide of digital data, enveloped in its blanket of reassurance that if only we know what's happening, we're going to be fine. Compared to office-based land life, the data streams at sea seem far more manageable, limited to quantified metrics of the immediate natural world: depth, wind direction, boat speed. Our ham radio, an archetype for old-school communications, is also digital - its circuitry, and yes, even its attached modem - and allows us to send and receive emails to and from our shore-based family and friends, and to download weather forecasts. In our defense, these incoming and outgoing data streams are reasonably limited, and focused -- leaving us largely to our own devices and amusements, to our own reflections and recollections. As I've mentioned in earlier posts, we have been leading a rather clutter-free existence these past few years, freeing ourselves to experience and consider the random emanations of memory, paths taken and avoided, friends kept and lost, the intimacy of new lands and new cultures.

Undoubtedly, the use of digital instruments on a boat has made sailing safer, and easier, and more intuitive - at least for those raised in the digital age. I have friends who pointedly avoid using the new charting systems, choosing instead to lay out the paper charts, pull out the parallel rulers, squeeze brass dividers to plot a position and course, peer at the horizon for cloud-borne hints of changes in the weather. I'm sympathetic to this approach, and have paper charts, rulers, and dividers on board. I even have a sextant, which I pull out now and again to dust off the old skills of rocking an arc and calculating latitude, and I can tell by the evening sky whether it'll be a calm night or a rainy night (most times). It's important not to be solely reliant on battery-dependent electronics when you're all alone on a big ocean. Redundancy is a life saver, but even so, I'm glad for my chartplotter, GPS, and digitized communications capabilities.

However, it is important to recall that, even if surrounded by digital devices and analog backups, being on a boat at sea is still a risky venture. Because when the proverbial hits the rotating, you're pretty much on your own. Case in point: Some German friends of ours, who we had over for dinner in Cape Town, were the unexpected lead story on a recent morning ham radio cruisers' net, when it was reported they lost their mast 140 miles off the coast of French Guyana. They're OK, and they'll be OK, but I was struck that they were able to use their (digital) Iridium phone to call the German rescue service, who coordinated with French Guyana in case an at-sea rescue was needed (at last report, it wasn't); they were able to use their GPS to report their location to their fellow cruisers, using an Iridium-enabled email service; and they were able to provide, using their wind instruments, the precise weather conditions at the moment of dismasting. All well and good, and we all breathed a sigh of relief and murmured a prayer of thanks when we learned that all was well (at last report, they'll motor in to the nearest port).

But still. There they were, at 2:30 in the morning in 25 knot winds, and their mast topples in the water, a jumble of jagged and bent aluminum frames, steel cables, ropes, and Dacron cloth, just the two of them, working frantically to keep the mast from puncturing their hull, all while avoiding a potentially fatal entanglement in the confused mess of rigging. Their world suddenly got very analog, and no degree of digital data or digitized connection was going to help them in that moment. Thankfully, they are strong and experienced sailors, and they seem to have managed to live and sail another day. It could have been much worse.

Jennifer and I talked over our friends' ordeal, and re-lived, as best we could, the initial panic and then grim determination that surely characterized their emotions and actions that early moonless morning, and repeated a prayer for their safe landfall and speedy return to passage making. We can prefer the digital, keep charts as a backup, and reduce the clutter, but in the end, we're on our own out here, even if we feel (and are) safer for our communications capabilities and instruments- when they're not blanked out in a curtain of gray, that is.

So, when I'm not considering the structural stability of our mast, this gray zone continues to vex me: where are the curving contours lines of chasms and seamounts, the magenta outlines of fishing exclusion zones? Where's the nearest land in case we hit something, or, God forbid, lose a mast. For now, that information lies on the tabletop below, on the familiar thick paper of charts of yore, on the wonderfully old school Brazilian chart upon whose surface I now painstakingly inscribe our daily position, a penciled series of circled crosses gradually extending northwestward across a wide expanse of the "South Atlantic Ocean: South America to Africa." It's a(nother) big ocean, as I am fond of saying, and we're taking it one day at a time, under smudged white cloud skies, across blue waters, coming to peace with the emptiness of a featureless gray screen.

Isolation

RMS St. Helena arriving 

It’s Thursday, in the tiny harbor of Jamestown, St. Helena, and the monthly visit of the Royal Mail Ship (RMS) St. Helena just ended; the shops are (briefly) full of fruit, sodas, fresh meat, and produce, and the docks are silent after a few frantic days of offloading and loading containers. This complete reliance on ship-borne materials is not unique to this island – most of the Pacific islands we visited were similarly reliant. But St. Helena’s physical isolation from the rest of the world – borne of its distance from any adjoining land or island-based airports – makes it unique among the world’s populated islands. Anything or anyone arriving here passes through Cape Town – itself relatively remote – and then boards the RMS for a five day voyage. Medical evacuations must wait for the ship. Fruit is at least a week old when it arrives. No one is in a real rush, and the locals exude a sense of resigned pride – or is it acceptance? – in their geographic fate.

Initially, after its discovery by European explorers (there were no natives to displace, evangelize or exploit), the island’s isolation was its appeal: a place where ship, headed to and from India and the East Indies around the Cape of Good Hope, could stop for water, or a place to send unruly Emperors. Its earliest settlers were either sent here or brought here to serve the passing ship traffic; there were precious few “volunteers,” in the sense of intrepid souls seeking a new land. Then and now, there were and are many other places better suited to starting a new life, places not nearly as isolated as this rock in the ocean.

Turk's Bay

Today, that isolation is threatened, one might say, by the big news that the British Government has finally committed to building an airport on this jagged volcanic island 1700 miles northeast of Cape Town, South Africa. Of course, the development-minded citizens and ex-pats of St. Helena see the airport as the harbinger of all things good: better access to the rest of the world, more tourists, more business, and, well, you know the drill.

600 feet of stairs - town to fort

But after spending a week here, I worry that the very thing that a small majority of Saints – as the locals are referred to – see as their salvation may prove, in the end, to be another disappointment, and may, in fact threaten it’s self-proclaimed and somewhat dubious status as “the most extraordinary place on earth.” For aside from its isolation – limiting immigration and emigration, as well as tourism – it is not clear how to define the soul of this curious island. Unlike many Pacific islands, which have their millennia-old native cultures to serve as foundations for their identities, St. Helena’s relative youth as a peopled land leaves it grasping at straws in its effort to define itself. Viewed in that light, the island’s history seems one of successive efforts to define itself to themselves and the outside world, only to have those efforts fall short in the face of its unalterable isolation, its seemingly non-entrepreneurial culture, and its forbidding geology.

Cinder block houses; no termites!

The airport is scheduled for completion in 2016 or so; the plebiscite on its construction passed with a bare majority, with ex-pat Saints in the Falklands, Ascension and England providing the margin of victory. Local sentiments tend toward the skeptical; one local promised us that the airport “would destroy the island;” a mail clerk highlighted that it “would be good for medical evacuations, but that’s about it.” A groundskeeper told us that the airport would be the excuse used by England to reduce and then eliminate its considerable annual subsidy to the island, a goal echoed the next day by the island’s appointed governor in the press conference announcing this year’s subsidy. In so many words, the governor described the new budget as focused on the airport with the goal of economic sufficiency.

Flax, covering a hillside

Hmm. Years ago, the island puts all its chips on flax, the spiked, narrow-bladed plant that can be milled into thread and fabric. Today, the island‘s wet interior is overrun with the plant – a not-unattractive, albeit impenetrable ground cover. In 1966, the island’s six flax mills closed: economically untenable. More recently, an effort to become self-sufficient in lumber – the island has many old forests – fell victim to a similar fate. The cost of transporting timber to a mill, and the cost of maintaining the mill, proved too much. It was cheaper to ship the 2x4s in from South Africa. There are some coffee trees on the island – reportedly, the beans are exquisite – but volumes are not high. There’s a small commercial fishing fleet, but the markets are in South Africa, and depend on the ship.

Tourism and ex-pat repatriations seem to be the dominant source of foreign exchange. Most islanders seem content to eke out a living, growing a few vegetables, driving the few tourists around, re-selling imported items to each other and to tourists, or working for the government, maintaining the narrow roads, rebuilding rickety retaining walls, or, now, lining up to work constructing the airport. Mostly, people like their subsidy from England, content to wait for the occasional influx of tourists.

Longwood House, Napoleon's last stand

Tourists are drawn to this island for several reasons, not least of which are its isolation (I’ve been to St. Helena!), and its claim as Napoleon’s place of exile and death. We visited Longwood, his home away from home, as it were, and were underwhelmed. Maintained in a lackadaisical fashion by the French Government, the home is filled with replica furniture and artifacts, a seemingly random collection of portraits and busts of the Emperor, with just a few pieces of written curation – in French. The local guides do their best to provide context, but too often we heard that this piece or that was a “faithful copy.” Even Napoleon’s Tomb is a bait-and-switch, his body having been exhumed long ago and returned to France. Call me cynical, but I’m not sure the lack of an airport is the only thing responsible for the limited number of visitors to the Napoleon Complex.

There’s talk of a five-star hotel and an 18-hole golf course, post-airport. Maybe so, but the island has no beaches, and aside from a few forts in various states of renovation and decay, there’s not going to be much going on outside the grounds of the resort. Limited access to the internet costs almost US$200/month, and for US$50/month, you get three TV channels. Intra-island phone service is expensive (the phone booths are marked on the island’s maps and there are no cell phones), and fuel is a staggering US$10 per gallon. These are not indices for a vibrant tourist destination.

Northern vistas -- Lot and Lot's Wife formations

What the island does have is magnificent geology – spectacular peaks and valleys, cliffs and bluffs, and a breathtaking diversity of micro-climates. You can practically live anywhere in the world on this island: rainforest, arid plain, desert, seaside – it all depends on where you build your house. Four seasons can be experienced in the same day. There are hikes galore, passing through and across a landscape whose vistas change by the mile. The sea is a constant visual presence. In these respects, one can see the truth in the island’s claim to be the most magnificent place on earth. The geology is a defining and limiting factor: roads are impossibly narrow, carved out of steep cliffs, switching back and forth up sheer walls. There’s no flat land to speak of; the airport will be excavated out of the only relatively level land on the island, and, interestingly for an airport about 600 miles from the nearest (military) airport, is fogged in from time to time during the winter months. There are three herds of cattle on the island – nearly all the land is just too steep for grazing, farming seems out of the question. There are just a few settlements of more than a few dozen houses – most houses are built above or beyond the roads, their access to adjoining houses limited by the need to climb down or up steep driveways and to navigate roads whose sides are defined by rock walls on one side and deadly drops on the other. It’s a difficult place to imagine being developed further.

We have enjoyed our stay here; we are used to the logistical limitations of islands, to their high prices and short supplies. We are comfortable ferrying from boat to land and back again. We spend our time touring the island, visiting with fellow cruisers, and doing boat maintenance. St. Helena is a wonderful place for boats and ships to stop on their way to somewhere else; I’m just not sure it’s ever going to realize its promise as a tourist destination. The airport’s viability is predicated on increased tourism, and on it not irrevocably changing the essential attraction of the island – its isolation. As we leave here for the islands of the Caribbean, I worry that St. Helena’s airport may, in fact, result in the worst of both worlds: inadequate economic activity coupled with a permanent loss of that which makes this island unique: its extraordinary remoteness.

         

The Turn North

Once we left Thursday Island, Australia in June 2011, we’ve been traveling west and south to round the Cape of Good Hope.  A few weeks ago, we began our northbound trip home, leaving Cape Town for the Caribbean via St. Helena, a small volcanic island one-third of the way between Cape Town and the Caribbean.  Our passage to St. Helena was a classic fair-weather passage, with moderate winds and seas nearly the whole way, and the thirteen days and nights passing in a languorous procession of easy watches, routine sail changes, and the gentle transit of the moon from a bright fullness to its empty newness.

Here are some pictures:

Leaving Cape Town, some goodbye flicks of the tail

Backlit genaker, pulling us along

Diagonal rainbows on a calm cloudy afternoon

Wind coming up; preparing the genaker for hoisting

Another day, another glorious sunset

Red-tailed Tropic bird, flying out to greet us to St. Helena

Arrived at St. Helena

At 1900 GMT, on 20 February 2012, ile Grace arrived at Jamestown, St. Helena safe and sound. They expect to have internet ashore tomorrow, and will post an update soon.

Where We Started

We haven't seen another boat or ship in days, and with the skies clear and the seas calm, we are ghosting along at 5 knots, our genaker filled by an eerily-steady 12 knot wind from dead astern. It's been like this for a few days, and the weather forecast suggests that identical conditions will prevail for the next 7 days. South African sailors had "warned" us it would be like this - blue skies, gentle and favorable winds, and following seas - but that's the sort of prediction you learn to suspect at a young age: "everything's going to be great, just you wait and see!" I don't know about you, but I've always tended to manage my expectations, to hope for the best but prepare for the worst, as they say. Happily for us on this leg of our circumnavigation, even though we prepared for the worst, we're enjoying the best as we head homeward, back to where we started this circumnavigation, northwest across the South Atlantic Ocean.

It's just after midnight; the moon has been waning since we've left Cape Town, rising later each night, its now bowl-like shape hidden at first by the eastern horizon's clouds before lifting into a speckled pin cushion sky. Sailing to St. Helena, on our way to the Caribbean and the Bahamas, we are tracking the length of the fuzzy swath of the Milky Way's edge, our bow and stern lined up with this nightly reminder that our little planet sits inside a swirling disk of billions of stars. It's dark enough to make out the nebulae in Orion's sword, and on nights like these, with no ship traffic, we can run dark, without running lights, the better to see the stars.

Sometimes turning the lights off improves your vision. For me, a quiet night watch lengthens my vision backward, toward the voyages and discoveries of my younger days, the time leading up to this journey's beginnings. Running downwind, across a rippling sea barely visible in the cloud-diffused light from the distant half moon, I'm in a reflective mood; nothing to distract my wandering thoughts, no running lights, no sail changes, no radio traffic, no navigational worries - just a blank mind canvas, gliding atop a big ocean under a sprawling sky.

During one of those younger periods, I tended to follow my nose in developing my musical and literary tastes; an artist would appear on one of my favorite group's albums, and I'd check him or her out, or a writer would acknowledge another in a foreword, and I'd go to the library and look up the new author. Once, in high school, while reading an exegesis of Bob Dylan's song, All Along the Watchtower, the critic highlighted the similarity of one of its couplets to a couplet in T.S. Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock. Who was this Eliot?

That reference led me to Eliot -- his poetry, plays, and criticisms, and, eventually, to a set of lines from The Little Giddings, lines that I've carried with me all these years. You and I have since seen it on various inspirational posters and cards, but at the time, as a high school kid looking to sail the oceans, it resonated deeply. It still does: "We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time."

Exploring -- the act of leaving home and then returning - the hero's journey, as Joseph Campbell might call it - seems inevitably, in stories, poems and myths, to generate a deeper understanding of oneself and one's literal and figurative home. In fact, I'm pretty sure there's nothing inevitable about it. It takes a lot of hard work to avoid the sensation and result of "just passin' through," as the R. Crumb character of the 1960s might have put it. When we set out on our circumnavigation, I knew I wasn't interested in "just passin' through," but I imagined more the new places and people we'd meet, and less the inner journey. Tonight, a rising moon brings into focus the difficulties faced by a traveler open to extracting revelations of self-discovery, revelations promised by the poet to a reflective explorer.

I've always tended to be a go-it-alone kind of person, assuming I can solo navigate around shoals and shipwrecks, that I can steer to deeper waters, find new passages and hidden harbors. Now, I see more clearly that any journey of the body, mind, heart, or soul benefits greatly from a guide, someone to hold a mirror up, to point the way, to help one avoid the unseen dangers, hidden reefs, flawed assumptions. It's hard enough most days just putting one foot in front of another, without finding the motivation, energy, and wherewithal to take a step in a different direction, to continue the difficult process of self-discovery, self-awareness, and change. In the journey we call living, pursuing our day-to-day dreams, these guides - or navigators -- take many forms - friends, parents, siblings, colleagues, supervisors, mentors, clergy - and we are better people, parents, and spouses for their insights and prodding.

On our boat-bound sail around the world, outside guides are scarce. We've been on an exploration considerably more isolated and solitary than our prior land-based journeys. Here, we have only each other, for the most part, to serve as a navigator. On this circumnavigation, two of us on a boat, we face not only the physical, financial, and logistical challenges of setting sail around the world, but also the reality that personal growth and illumination depend almost solely on ourselves and each other.

We push and pull each other along, Jennifer and I, in circumstances that are at once ideal and trying. It's difficult sometimes to convey, much less to experience, the interpersonal intensity attendant to our extended isolation on a broad expanse of ocean, periodically ensconced in foreign lands and cultures. Intensity, in escapable doses, can be a wonderful thing; unrelenting intensity without relief presents its own challenges, and we're still calibrating ways to give each other space, silence, and support. For me, so much more easier said than done.

So perhaps the uncomfortable truth about the process of discovery, of returning home to know it for the first time, is that the mere act of journeying, while perhaps necessary, is hardly sufficient. Pushing through the molasses of ignorance, generating new insights against decades of preconceptions, re-adjusting behaviors and expectations seemingly hardwired into one's being - these processes of growth depend not only on the journey, but on one's ability to navigate the shoals of one's personal history, on one's proclivity for self-awareness or self-delusion, and on overcoming one's natural defense mechanisms and easy explanations. In this, we long for direction, a destination, and a guide, much as a sailor longs for a compass, charts, and a navigator's local knowledge. In the end, we work with what we have, harness the wind, weather the storms, trim the sails.

Our boat sails forth, headed northwest to St. Helena, pushed along by fair and following seas and winds, but we can only go so fast, limited by the laws of physics and the friction of the water against our hulls. No matter how fast the wind blows, no matter how much we want to change, no matter how quickly we seek to know, perhaps for the first time, the place where we started, we are limited by the ephemeral laws of our own natures. Boats arrive no sooner or later than the weather allows. Insight appears on its own schedule; wisdom emerges on its own timetable.

We set sail, leave our homes, undertake fantastic explorations of our world and ourselves, but in the end, learn that we cannot dictate or predict our pace of discovery, or when and how we might return to where we started, or even if, God willing, we might then know it for the first time. Under diaphanous skies, we journey onward, closing on home, or somewhere near it, hoping to arrive safely, among friends and family, a bit wiser than when we left.


Where We Started

What goes around comes around,
So the wind that passes across the deck
Seems destined to pass over us again,
Perhaps wondering why we've moved so little,
Taking so long to sail across these waters,
Maybe thinking it's not blowing steadily enough,
That by gusting more frequently, or stronger
We'd find ourselves closer to home.

But a wind can only push you so fast and so far
Against ocean currents that have their own design,
So we bide our time, trim our sails, wend our way
Through reluctant waters, making our way around,
Yearning for a landfall somewhere close to home.

Personal Milestone

Jennifer, and ile de Grace, passing the 360 degree mark!

At 8:26 pm Greenwich Mean Time, on Friday, February 17, 2012, ile de Grace crossed 1 degrees, 10.2 minutes West longitude. The significance being that both ile de Grace and Jennifer have now crossed every degree of longitude on the planet by sea. On April 25, 2008, she and I, along with Captain Larry and mates Dominique and Alex, left La Rochelle, France on her delivery voyage across the North Atlantic to the Chesapeake Bay. While a circumnavigation it does not make, that is a lot of blue water in just under four years and, for me, a personal milestone.

Tracks

When I started ocean sailing, back in the proverbial day, you used your sextant or radio direction finder or LORAN receiver to plot your position at least daily - but often no more frequently than that. Once the daily position was marked, you then drew a pencil line from your last plotted position, and voila, that was the course and distance you'd sailed. A two-week trip so marked resembled one of those connect-the-numbered-dots diagrams you'd find in a green-covered edition of Children's Highlights, lying on the 1980s table of every dentist and pediatrician in America.

With kids, jobs, soccer games and rowing practice, ocean sailing took a long-time hiatus from my life, but in the summer of 2001, with a little time on my hands, I helped a friend sail his lovely and eminently ocean-capable sloop from his home on the Eastern Shore to Bermuda and then back again. I quickly discovered that things had changed in the position tracking department. By 2001, nautical charts had moved from paper to the computer screen, and GPS had replaced the quaint sextant. In addition, marine engineers had figured out how to plot one's GPS position as a continuous set of points onto the electronic chart. No more the point-to-point pencil lines, the jagged corners and impossibly straight lines of imperfectly recorded movements over the course of a voyage. By 2001, one's course, or track, as it had come to be known, inscribed a lovely continuous flowing line on a glowing screen at the navigator's table, along with data displays of distance traveled, speed over ground, and other sundry bits of useful information. Moving from analog to digital, from discrete quanta to continuous data seems the way of the world, but at the time, I missed the tactile experiences of figuring out one's position and then carefully denoting the boat's position on the durable paper of a nautical chart. In fact, I recall doing just that, and, against the advice of the electronic data and charts, advised my friend, erroneously it turns out, to sail a line further south than we needed to, thus extending unnecessarily the length of our outbound trip. So much for the old days.

All's well that ended well, to be sure, and on that trip I came to appreciate the value of knowing exactly where one is, and where one's been, and to let go of the reliance on those silly position and course approximations of a bygone era. Certainly anyone forced to navigate treacherous passages time and again has come to appreciate the safety of relying on earlier trips, retracing recorded tracks proven by experience to avoid the nasty shoal or the poorly-charted rock. And one certainly becomes a better helmsman, seeing precisely the track of an upwind leg, able to correlate the point of sail with the resulting speed made good to the next mark. But tracks also represent the immutable history of a boat's course through the water, a history that sometimes leaves the captain in the awkward position of "doing a bit of 'splaining," as Ricky Ricardo might have demanded of Lucille Ball. For tracks are stubborn things.

My first exposure to the stubbornness of tracks came on that 2001 trip to Bermuda, when we woke after our first night sailing - this would have been heading south down the shipping lanes of the Chesapeake. That morning, after an otherwise uneventful night, the track laid bare Terry's - it would have been me, had I drawn the night watch -- struggles to disentangle the many buoy channel lights from the many navigational lights on the steady stream of ships bound to and from the port of Baltimore. In daytime it can be tough to avoid the shoals and the ships at the same time, but at night, the constellation of lights in the lower Chesapeake can be downright baffling. Small boats like ourselves often find themselves dodging ships and shoals, darting first east and then west, speeding up to squeeze through a gap in the traffic, or slowing down to let a tanker pass. Bottom line? The morning track showed we'd done at least one 360 degree turn, trying to make sense of the lights and traffic. In the good old days, the circular maneuver would have been lost to history, a forgotten episode on a trip that would have otherwise been noted on the chart as a straight-line passage from the dinner position to the breakfast position. In 2001, however, the track proved a stubborn thing. (Of course, the trip's final track also "proved" that my routing advice to Bermuda was seriously flawed, so my friend and I have tacitly agreed not to discuss either experience in mixed company.)

On our circumnavigation, some ten years after that initial introduction to tracks, we've had a number of instances where our navigational prowess-and I use the term loosely - has been memorialized by our system's tracks, and it's useful, in the spirit of keeping our egos in check, to recall a few of these. My personal favorite came when I sailed ile de Grace from Bali to Gili Air, a small island across the narrow Indonesian Lombok Strait, a channel characterized by extremely heavy tidal currents. On the day in question, I watched with dismay as our speed over ground slowed to just a few knots, despite having both engines at maximum RPMs. On close examination, as I zoomed in on my chart display, I discovered not only was the boat moving slowly through the water, its bow headed northeast, but it was moving backward -- sliding to the southwest at 2 knots. In a state of disbelief at a current of some 8 knots, I peeled out of the fastest part of the tidal stream, turned the boat to the southeast, and managed to ride the current eastward to the lee of a mid-channel island. The track doesn't lie: paying little heed to the current, I managed to move the boat backwards with the engines in forward.

A more consequential experience was the time we entered a Fijian bay after a grueling passage from Tonga. Our track shows us entering the bay, steering toward its center, and then pushing ahead into waters clearly marked on the electronic chart as being too shallow for our boat. However, we were so focused on positioning our boat relative to other already-anchored boats, and focusing on the murky water that we missed the electronic data. A few hours on the rocks, no lasting damage except to our egos, and a useful learning experience, still memorialized on our track.

Readers may recall the several instances where, in the process of raising, reefing, or dousing a sail, we elected or managed to motor the boat in a complete circle - normally not an issue, except when one's fishing lines are left astern, slack and busy wrapping themselves around our spinning props. Again, our tracks reveal the 360 degree path of the boat, followed by the inevitable squiggles of a drifting boat as I've jumped overboard to cut loose the tangled monofilament line from our props.

More recently, in our first day crossing the South Atlantic a few days ago, we were caught off guard by the strange nighttime movements of a large fishing boat just northwest of Cape Town - taking evasive action, our track, shows us sailing north then west, then southwest -- at which point both of us were on deck trying to sort out how best to avoid a collision. Collision avoided, but the convoluted track still remains.

Finally, in an example of how tracks can help maintain a sense of integrity on a circumnavigation, we used our earlier track of entering Cape Town harbor to assure that Jennifer's circumnavigation will be a true and complete circumnavigation. I had taken the boat from Cape Town to Saldanha Bay, about 60 miles north, for some engine work while Jennifer attended to land-based responsibilities. Thus, she "missed" that part of our trip. In leaving South Africa, we decided to sail together back to Cape Town, cross our earlier arrival track that had been recorded for posterity's sake, and then turn northwest for St. Helena. Thus, our track shows conclusively that Jennifer and I, together, sailed every inch of every mile from Annapolis to our present position, with no gaps.

It is a circumnavigator's goal to "cross one's outbound track." That's what makes it a circumnavigation. It doesn't "count" if you leave from, say, England, sail through the Panama Canal, across the Pacific and Indian Oceans, round the Cape of Good Hope, and make final landfall in Brazil. You've sailed through every line of longitude, but you have not, strictly speaking, circumnavigated. I'm not sure who makes these rules, but it's also, technically, not a circumnavigation if you don't cross the equator twice. No fair circling Antarctica and calling it an around-the-world trip. We crossed the equator just this side of the Galapagos, and will cross it for the second time on our passage from St. Helena to the Caribbean.

We expect to cross our original departure track somewhere in the Bahamas, when we sail, God willing and the sea don't fall, across our 2010 course of ile de Grace's first passage from Fort Lauderdale to the Caribbean Sea. It'll probably be in the vicinity of Georgetown, in the Exumas, where we spent a few lovely days at anchor getting ready for our trip to Panama. Wherever we cross our line, as the expression goes, our not-so-newfangled charts will show a thin red line crossing an older thin red line, inscribed several years and many adventures ago, when our dream was still just a dream.

Tracks are stubborn things. This trip has taken more than a little perseverance - in its planning, launch, and, not least, in its execution. You can say that circumnavigators are also stubborn types - we have to be, with the sea, weather, and circumstance throwing up so many obstacles to completion. So yes - we're stubborn creatures, and yes, we've come to appreciate - even laugh at - the equally stubborn things called tracks, because even though they have recorded some forgettable moments, they are also memorializing an unforgettable experience.

Northbound

Tomorrow morning, we leave South African waters for the tiny, isolated island of St. Helena, some 1700 nautical miles north-northwest of here.  If you paid attention in history class, you'll remember that this is the island that Napoleon was exiled to.  To this day, lacking an airport, it is one of the most remote populated islands on the planet, and relies on regular supply ships from Cape Town to provide its residents food and fuel and other items.  To put this remoteness in context, every island we visited in the South Pacific either had an airport or was within a day's sail of an airport.  It's a bit disconcerting to know that once we leave South Africa, we will be more on our own than at any other time of our trip. Happily, the South Atlantic is known for its bucolic weather.

It should be a relatively easy run, with the winds behind the beam; the South Atlantic high may give us some windless days, but the wind and seas should be moderate as we head northward to the equator.

You can track our progress using either of the two links on the left-hand side of this page.

After a brief layover in St. Helena, we plan to make our longest non-stop sail of our circumnavigation, about 3700 nautical miles to one of the Windward Islands, that mark the southern edge of the Caribbean Sea.

Township

Apartheid, the Afrikaans word for the policy of segregation of races, ended less than twenty years ago, but its evidence and its legacy are impossible to ignore here in South Africa.  Even if one chose to visit only private game parks, golf courses and high end resorts, you would still drive by a Township, Location or Informal Settlement on your way from the airport to your luxury destination.  Today, most foreigners would see them as slums or shanty towns, but for Jon and I, it was important to understand how they came to be, and what they are like inside, given that millions of South Africans call them home and that we had driven by so many of them.  We drove through one township on the edge of Kimberley, but without a guide or an invitation, we did not gain much insight.  So in Cape Town, where tours are easily available and affordable, we signed up to visit two, Langa and Khayelitsha, as well as the District Six Musueum.  Tours are welcomed by township leaders, as they bring both tourism dollars into the township but also make "outsiders" more aware of the conditions and challenges faced by these communities.  Just like the South African media, these tours put it all out there.  Nothing is swept under the rug, not the ugly, not the bad, and not beautiful.

Khayelitsha is home to over 2 million people.

Around 1913 and 1936, the British, who controlled South Africa at the time, began to segregate Black Africans, Asians from India and Indonesia, and people of mixed race, into reserves to contain these populations and to preserve most of the remaining land for those of European descent -- much as native Americans were forced onto reservations in the US.  When the National Party (Afrikaans) came to power in 1948, this policy of segregation was formalized into the creation of "Homelands" for the dark skinned people.  They got about 13% of the land, and the white-skinned people got about 87% of the land.  But the English and Afrikaans wanted cheap labor to work in their mines, factories and farms, so they created segregated places for this labor (men only) to live.  Their families had to remain in the Homelands, and the men lived in newly- created "Townships" near work, and usually along a major highway for ease of transportation.  There were separate townships for Black Africans, Asians, and Colored (people of mixed race).  All Townships were -- and are -- enclosed by tall fences.

Old dormitory at Langa awaiting renovation.

Originally, townships consisted of dormitories.  Langa, founded in the early 1920s under the Urban Areas Act, is one of the oldest townships around Cape Town.  An older unit (within one building) we visited initially housed about 18 men; three men to a room that is smaller than a typical college dormitory room, and about six rooms per unit which had a small common room and kitchen area.  These men would work from January through November and go home to visit their families in December.  Their families were not allowed to visit them and they had to carry a Pass at all times indicating where they were allowed to go.  After Apartheid ended, families were able to join their husbands and fathers, and now, where three men once lived, three families now live.  That is one small room, three single bunk beds, with small children on the floor, adults sharing the bed and older children sleeping out in the common room.  The beds are high so that there is storage room underneath, and some storage suspended from the ceiling.  It is not a lot of space and there cannot be much privacy.

An old dorm room, now accommodating families.

Sign from the era, District Six Museum

But not all who live in a Township arrived there under this method of labor camps giving way, post-apartheid, to family homes. In Cape Town, there was a neighborhood called District Six.  It was close to the waterfront and people of different races lived there together.  From the 1960s to 1980s, the government -- seeking to make Cape Town more white, removed all the dark-skinned people who lived there out of their homes and into one of the several townships around Cape Town.  Their homes were destroyed, much of the area is still vacant, and only the churches are left from the original community.  Today, the Methodist Church, which had been a liquor store before becoming a church, has been turned in to the District Six Museum.  This museum is dedicated to preserving the memories of what the community once was like, the memories of those who lived there and to serve as testament to the extent to which the Apartheid regime would go to keep different races segregated from each other and from the white community.  Our young guide was born in Langa Township, but his family had been evicted from District Six and moved there against their will.  People did not have a choice to where they were moved, and neighbors were separated from each other indifferently, and due to the Pass law, were not free to visit each other.

An individual home, view to the left.

That is how Townships came to have homes other than dormitories.  What looks like an individual shack is a family’s home, cobbled together from what ever materials they could get.  They are sometimes no more than 10 feet by 10 feet and are very, very close together.  They are hot in the summer and cold in the winter, because they are made out of spare wood, cardboard, tin, and plastic.  Those who cannot afford the pay-as- you-go electricity cook their food and heat their homes with small burners, which often results in fires and loss of life.  Access to water and proper sewer are also major issues.  For the most part, we saw port-a-potties, but the occasional out house was also evident.

The same home, view to the right.  All very combustible.

Renovated dorm for single family.

Some homes in some townships are nicer and were built by the companies that employed the workers.  Some dormitories were, and are being, renovated by local governments to accommodate families.  Those that live three families to a room, pay 20 Rand a month in rent.  That is 6-7 US dollars.  A renovated single-family apartment costs about 300 Rand a month (about $37).  If someone makes enough money, they can buy a “mortgage” home in a township and live “upscale” compared to their neighbors.  What struck Jon and I as being so different from America was that people more often than not stayed in their township, even if they made more money.  They either added a second floor, or moved to a newer home within the township.  In America, if one makes more money, one often moves to a more expensive neighborhood.  Here in South Africa, people love their communities and, even though the community was founded against their will, it is now their home and many choose not to leave, even if they can.

Brand new houses along the edge of Langa.

Woman carrying sheep heads for the grill.

Life and business is vibrant in a township.  Small convenience shops are within walking distance, barber and beauty shops are nearby created from an old shipping container.  Local food is grilled for the equivalent of fast food carry out.  While grilled sausages seemed appealing, the sheep’s heads were a bit hard to imagine as being yummy.  But it shows the extent to which people will go to get protein.  The sheep heads are discarded from butcheries, but are put to good use by people who are too poor to afford a mutton roast or a leg of lamb.  Our guide told us that the cheeks, tongues and eyeballs were the best, but that even they would not eat the brain.  There is also a lively music scene at night.

In Khayelitsha, we visited the first Bed and Breakfast located in a Township.  Vicky is an entrepreneur who saw tourists visiting the New South Africa and thought she would go after some of their business.  Her first customers were young people from The Netherlands.  For those who want an authentic township experience, and some good food, she comes highly recommended in the Lonely Planet guide to South Africa.  She has inspired others to go into this business as well and puts some of her earnings back into the community by supporting school children who pass to the next grade.

We visited a nursery school, founded by a local woman who wanted the children to be prepared for primary school.  The population of these townships is very large, with Mitchell's Plain and Khayelitsha being among Cape Town's largest.  In Langa alone, with close to a million residents, there are four high schools; Khayelitsha is home to over two million people.  The human density is hard to imagine and is difficult to capture without aerial photography.

A shebeen, in Langa

Like any neighborhood anywhere in the world, township neighborhoods have their local pub.  It is called a shebeen, which comes from an Irish word used the world over to mean an illegal bar that sells home brewed alcohol.  In South Africa, some shebeens are legal bars, but the names still holds.  In townships, the local sorghum beer, called utshwala,  is definitely homemade.  And, we were told, the best beer is made by women.  Like drinking Kava in Tonga, Fiji and Vanuatu, drinking homemade beer is a social experience, where the men sit in a circle according to senority, the eldest drinks first and they all partake from a communal bowl (or bucket in the shebeen we visited).  I gave the local brew a try, but not being a beer drinker to begin with, I found it a bit too yeasty, thick, and sour for my taste.

Illegal shanty, OK for now, but not eligible for new housing

When one lives in a township legally, you are entitled to an electric box, which is used like a pre-paid phone card.  It is pay as you go, but for those who cannot afford to use electricity, they get 50 Rand worth per month so that they can get light without burning lamps.  There is also a grandfather clause that allows those who built their own homes prior to a certain date, to be eligible for a newly-constructed government home, government budget permitting.  If a home is built after that date, a blue circle with an "x" through it is painted on the home and it is ineligible for (legal) electricity and services.  This is the government’s way of handling squatting, the building of homes on land one does not own and tapping into the electrical grid without paying for it. It is OK to build, but you have no guarantees and no official services.  Adequate housing, like jobs, are in short supply, and the blue circles do not keep people from living there. Nor has it been possible to keep people from moving into the townships from rural areas in search of jobs, and ending up in squatters locations (known as informal settlements) when they cannot find work. And of course, the spaghetti nest of electrical wires illustrates that people will figure out ways to get electricity, whether it is sanctioned or not.  But it is not without personal risk.  Just as the housing material is often combustible, the illegal wiring is not always done properly and electrocutions and fires result.

South Africa's future is its children.

Though the government is slowly making improvements, there is not enough money to make it all happen over night.  There is progress, but there is still a long way to go.  Still, after nearly 20 years, some are angry with ruling African National Congress (ANC) for unmet expectations.  Complicating this housing shortage has been the influx of refugees from other African countries that make South Africa look like the land of golden opportunity.  There are many refugees from Zimbabwe, followed by the Congo, Malawi, Nigeria and other countries.  Sometimes these informal settlements are destroyed and its inhabitants evicted.  But new ones emerge, and will continue to emerge, until there are enough jobs and houses to make informal settlements a part of South Africa's history and not its present.

As we visited the District Six Museum and heard the stories about the creation of Townships, it was impossible for me not to feel the familiar pain and shame of the racism I witnessed as a child in Wichita Falls, Texas where public schools were desegregated under court order nearly 20 years after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education.  As the recent American film, The Help, reminds us all, racism in parts of America remained pernicious a century after the Civil War and it took one hundred years after the end of slavery and the ratification of our 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution for Black Americans to be guaranteed the right to vote and for our own apartheid signs and policies to come down.  While there are still racists in America, and anyone is free to hold racist views, it is no longer socially acceptable and most people find it repugnant.

It is with this historical baggage as an American, that I look at the segregation of the races in South Africa and cannot help but feel heart broken by the sadness and cruelty of it in such an otherwise beautiful country.  And yet, what truly astounds both Jon and I, is just how little animosity there is among those who were most oppressed for those who oppressed them.  Such forgiveness is awe inspiring, and I believe for them, liberating.  And for those who do hold malice, the case of Julius Malema stands as a lesson.  He was the leader of the ANC Youth League, who spouted racial revenge and thought he could get away with it.  He was recently censured by the ANC, demoted from his position, just lost his appeal and his political future is in tatters.  As Jon wrote in his earlier blog on Pride, all the South Africans we have met love their country, love their families and look forward (some rather patiently) to a better tomorrow.