18 Days

Well. 17 days and 18 hours. The Pacific Crossing. It's a blur. Rob blog. :-)

The Earth is an ocean dotted with land. Sixteen days into our longest ocean crossing, I sit in the cockpit with my feet braced against the top of a table. The sun is rising behind us. We’re on a beam reach so the boat is heeled (leaned) to starboard by the trade winds, blowing steadily over my left shoulder.

After suffering a day of no wind, bobbing around in the ocean like an apple, it was a relief when last night the wind picked up and shifted to a most agreeable slightly south or east direction. And, off we go again at 8 knots on a beam reach.

What stands out about crossing the ocean for nearly three weeks? To start, the noises, especially at night. One notices the myriad of unique sounds on and around the boat. The ever present wind blowing across your ears, the sound of the ocean lapping and bursting as the boat moves through it, the creak of lines and squeak of metal under stress, the whirl of the autopilot and clank of the helm wheel being cranked back and forth by the invisible force of the autopilot, the sudden splash and foamy whoosh of the hull settling into a wave, the low rumble like far off thunder of the sail starting to lose tension, followed by a flapping and sometimes the enormous slap of the sail returning to tension. And then something down below falls with a thud or a crash, when a particularly beefy wave passes under us. There is never a quiet moment. Yet, somehow it is peaceful.

Next, there is the motion, our constant companion. No two movements are exactly alike, as no two waves are exactly alike and precisely meeting the boat in the same way. You could say there is a sort of pattern to the movement; for instance sets of swell come in threes, but, no set of swell moves the boat exactly the same, so the pattern is more of theme than a predictable movement. It's Heisenberg's uncertainty principle on a large scale. The rocking, shimmying, hesitation at the end of a sudden jerk, before the rise or the fall, with or without a shudder or sideways slide. It’s chaos; but a chaos our minds somehow disregard and life goes on, almost as normal as on land; except the occasional wild motion down below, followed by a quick shuffle across the room to try to catch your balance, followed by an out of control crash into the wall; or there is the occasionally more abnormal (than the normal abnormal) sudden jerk that sets you spinning around the axis of whatever you are holding onto at the moment: and, you are, hopefully, always holding onto something or you eventually will be thrown onto the sofa, down the steps into the kitchen, onto the bed, against the wall or on the floor. I imagine it’s how a monkey never falls from the trees. There’s always a hand keeping it safely amongst the branches. Same for us. One hand for the boat and one hand for me; that’s the old sailors saying. We are all just sea monkeys.

And last, there’s the ocean. More and more ocean and sky, and clouds and stars. It sets a spell and the days blur into one. The ocean is alive and moody. I have the sense that a long time has passed, but not a sense of what happened the day before yesterday or last Monday, or what day we caught that Mahi. Or, the seven tuna we caught. A blur.

So, in the end, we have each other out there. And, human beings are resourceful and adaptive, giving the right set of circumstances. Like, Calvin up the mast under sail to untangle the parasailor "big banana" we call it, from the top of the yankee furler.

And, when we arrived in Marquesas, I was happy to see land, but also melancholy that the crossing was over. Funny how that happens. On to Marquesas to look for Manta Rays.