The last few days sailing towards Brazil are heavenly. The
wind has risen significantly but also shifted more to the beam and evened out
into a steady blow without nasty squalls so the boat is flying through the seas
at top speed with a regular swinging motion. The moon, half full, is up till about
midnight lighting the boat and the ocean almost brightly enough to read by and
then sets in a blaze of glory leaving behind a pitch black sky filled with
countless brilliant stars like jewels flung across a canvas. Being woken by
Sophie to go on shift is a joy. (Also I have stopped asking HS for his permission
to set or adjust sails. If he is asleep I just go ahead and do what seems
appropriate. On more than one occasion the boat has sped up significantly
enough that the change has woken him and he has stuck his head out through the
top hatch wondering sleepily if the wind has come up. But shhh, don’t tell him
this, our relationship is tenuous enough as it is.)
I spend my night shifts, as do Sohpie and Adi, perched like a
mountain goat on the woodwork that surrounds the winches and cleats, holding on
to one of the many stays, scanning the horizon for other boats (our AIS system
has broken down), marvelling at the skies, and feeling a bit like Johnny Dep’s
character in Pirates of the Caribbean. The three hours always fly past and it
is usually so nice outside that it is almost with reluctance that I descend
into the boat to wake up Adelheid to take over for me. I feel I could do this
happily forever, sail on over across the oceans with one island receding behind
us and another soon to approach over the horizon.
During the day we are communal. We get lots of fresh air, we
eat healthy food, we read and talk and laugh and sing. Sohpie quotes poetry to
us and I have taken to dredging from my memory all the John Masefield I learnt
as a teen. When I run out of verses I can remember Adelheid tries to teach a
song, in German, and my efforts have us all laughing so hard that we wake the
captain. We point out schools of flying fish to each other and we all go and
stand on the bow together each time a pod of dolphins comes to swim with the
boat and we look forward to the next bird that will alight on our deck. We wait
to see a whale. There is no stress; we cannot control the winds, just deal with
whatever is there in the moment. Life is good.
During the night we are solitary. Everyone else on the boat is
asleep. Everyone else, it seems, in the universe is asleep. We have not seen another
boat for days. December 21st is approaching and it feels sometimes
as if the world might actually end on that date. Our connection to the rest of
the world is so suspended that we can all imagine getting to the point where
land is supposed to be and it just not being there, the world having ended
while we were away. As the colour of the sky is picked up by the waves during
the day highlighting them with blue so is the vastness of the heavens at the
night picked up by the sea at night stretching it in our minds into
unimaginable proportions. During our night shifts we each stand alone on deck,
buffeted by the wind, doused occasionally by the sea, learning the names of the
constellations and the myths that go with them, and though the darkness is wet
and wild it is yet at the same time also soft and embracing, and the sensation
of the world spinning beneath us while the stars spin above fills one with such
peace as cannot be put into words.
