I imagine...being far out to sea on my family's floating home. We haven't seen land for days. More than a week.
There is no moon. Both kids are staying up late, not just the oldest, whose turn it is at "night watch" with his dad: a game of cards in the cockpit, a mug of hot chocolate, frequent attention to duty in the form of scanning for ships.
The kids have been looking forward to this moment of celebration. They have come to call it Equator Day.
The home we left all these years ago is in the far north. But really we have a home port not a home. And a home port demands only the most nominal allegiance. It is merely a place to be from, and the distance and duration of that "from" are immaterial, or all to the good.
So while our home port is in the far north, we've been in the southern hemisphere for four years and three months. The sailors' hemisphere. The half of the globe where the waves are free to run as long as they will.
In my imagination, the children have a dance party in the cabin as we approach the line. In my imagination, they dance to Icona Pop.
We realize that we have forgotten to pull in the fishing lines at sunset. On one I find a busted leader. On the other a chicken-sized yellowfin tuna that is a beast to reel in with the speed of the boat pulling against.
I imagine that as we cross the line I am on my knees on the side deck cutting the second fillet.
I imagine that after I have scrubbed the blood and gurry from the side deck my wife and I enjoy a tot of scotch. Neptune gets his first with a heartfelt imprecation for his continued blessing.
I imagine it is the third time we've sailed across the equator as a family. I imagine that I'm dreaming. With my eyes wide open.
~~
This post was sent via our high-frequency radio as we're far from internet range. Pictures to follow when we reach internet again. We can't respond to comments for now, though we do see them all!
Tuesday, September 6, 2016
Saturday, September 3, 2016
Dancing on the Blue Marble
This is an experience that you would struggle to be cynical about.
What should we agree to call this shade of blue that surrounds Galactic, the same blue that dominates the view of the earth from space?
Miracle Blue, I think.
Very different from the turquoise shades that come springing alive from the surface of tropical atoll water over a sand bottom on a calm day. That kind of blue is splendid, though somewhat precious for being restricted to the vanishingly small extent of atolls on the surface of the globe.
This Miracle Blue that is all around us is also all around the earth, existing anywhere on the deep tropical ocean where the sun is shining. It is therefore an essential color, widespread enough to be a fundamental descriptor of this terraqueous home of ours. And a delight besides to stare at from the shade of our dodger as Galactic dances along.
The clouds around us are doing their best not to be outclassed, showing off that particular tradewind configuration of being fluffy on top with table-flat undersides that march off the curve of the earth as they retreat to the horizon.
We made 178 nautical miles, noon to noon, over the last 24 hours. Nothing world-beating. Just splendid sailing, comfortable enough in spite of the inevitable roll of being downwind in a breeze. Reefed main, rolled-up jib at about 100% of foretriangle area, which is all we can muster wing and wing with our collapsed whisker pole.
The flying fish have been generous with themselves, unwittingly. I hear them flapping on deck in the night and throw them back minus a handful of their scales but even so there were enough on deck this morning stiff and dead to justify the effort for lunch. Bony little things though. Unfortunately the great shearwaters are always around and take an unhealthy interest in our lures. We have a well-developed revulsion towards catching a bird and so have been laying off the tuna fishing.
The waves rear up behind us like hillsides leading to upland country where there might be something interesting to see. The waves collapse around us in flashes of white foam, like handkerchiefs waving from a cloud.
Last night, after a week or ten days without a ship, we had two of them. In the wee hours, and one of them quite close on an opposing and quickly converging course. I had stayed up too late and it was two in the morning and I couldn't make sense of it. I could see their red light which meant I was looking at their port side, but they seemed to be drawing away to our starboard side as they approached us. Our combined speed was quite high and I had that feeling of being in a quickly-changing situation that I didn't understand well enough not to do the wrong thing. As my family slept below.
So I woke Alisa for some quick help and there after the ship was two miles away we could see her starboard green light shining out from below the red. Maybe that's a combination I don't know, but it was too much for me for a while. No AIS signal from that ship or the one that followed an hour later.
~~
This post was sent via our high-frequency radio as we're far from internet range. Pictures to follow when we reach internet again. We can't respond to comments for now, though we do see them all!
What should we agree to call this shade of blue that surrounds Galactic, the same blue that dominates the view of the earth from space?
Miracle Blue, I think.
Very different from the turquoise shades that come springing alive from the surface of tropical atoll water over a sand bottom on a calm day. That kind of blue is splendid, though somewhat precious for being restricted to the vanishingly small extent of atolls on the surface of the globe.
This Miracle Blue that is all around us is also all around the earth, existing anywhere on the deep tropical ocean where the sun is shining. It is therefore an essential color, widespread enough to be a fundamental descriptor of this terraqueous home of ours. And a delight besides to stare at from the shade of our dodger as Galactic dances along.
The clouds around us are doing their best not to be outclassed, showing off that particular tradewind configuration of being fluffy on top with table-flat undersides that march off the curve of the earth as they retreat to the horizon.
We made 178 nautical miles, noon to noon, over the last 24 hours. Nothing world-beating. Just splendid sailing, comfortable enough in spite of the inevitable roll of being downwind in a breeze. Reefed main, rolled-up jib at about 100% of foretriangle area, which is all we can muster wing and wing with our collapsed whisker pole.
The flying fish have been generous with themselves, unwittingly. I hear them flapping on deck in the night and throw them back minus a handful of their scales but even so there were enough on deck this morning stiff and dead to justify the effort for lunch. Bony little things though. Unfortunately the great shearwaters are always around and take an unhealthy interest in our lures. We have a well-developed revulsion towards catching a bird and so have been laying off the tuna fishing.
The waves rear up behind us like hillsides leading to upland country where there might be something interesting to see. The waves collapse around us in flashes of white foam, like handkerchiefs waving from a cloud.
Last night, after a week or ten days without a ship, we had two of them. In the wee hours, and one of them quite close on an opposing and quickly converging course. I had stayed up too late and it was two in the morning and I couldn't make sense of it. I could see their red light which meant I was looking at their port side, but they seemed to be drawing away to our starboard side as they approached us. Our combined speed was quite high and I had that feeling of being in a quickly-changing situation that I didn't understand well enough not to do the wrong thing. As my family slept below.
So I woke Alisa for some quick help and there after the ship was two miles away we could see her starboard green light shining out from below the red. Maybe that's a combination I don't know, but it was too much for me for a while. No AIS signal from that ship or the one that followed an hour later.
~~
This post was sent via our high-frequency radio as we're far from internet range. Pictures to follow when we reach internet again. We can't respond to comments for now, though we do see them all!
Thursday, September 1, 2016
No News From Us/Dance Dance
The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews
Not to be born is the best for man
The second best is a formal order
The dance's pattern, dance while you can.
Dance, dance, for the figure is easy
The tune is catching and will not stop
Dance till the stars come down with the rafters
Dance, dance, dance till you drop.
-W.H. Auden, "Death's Echo"
I have been thinking occasionally and lately about the inadvisability of a "family sailing blog".
Not that I'm considering pulling the plug on Twice In A Lifetime. This has been the very delight of a pastime for me over the past nine years, the garden that I can tend who has neither patience nor earth for literal gardening.
I'm just thinking of how much of our time, both at sea and in port, devolves into the daily intimacies of family life lived in occasional isolation and permanently close association, and how this sort of living doesn't always necessarily make for newsworthy blog copy.
It might not be an accident that some of the most-read family sailing blogs appear to be written by people who got as far as a Caribbean marina, where they sit and blog authoritatively about the sailing life.
But, our news: We are sailing towards Brazil under jib alone. (Elias just spotted a storm petrel.) The main had a bad time yesterday and is therefore on deck just now. The grommet holding the luff to one of the mast cars ripped, and the 5200 that will hold on the elaborately-engineered repair will have to cure before the sail can again be set. One of the boxes that attach the battens to the mast cars also exploded, which made me very happy that in South Africa I finally bought three replacement boxes of a better design than the awful Schaefer boxes that came with the boat. We like the durability of a full-batten main, but when it's time to replace this sail a sailmaker will have to convince us that they have a better way to handle the luff attachments that give us chronic trouble.
While Elias and I were replacing the batten box the windvane decided that it had had enough. It's a model that is boldly warranted to last for a circumnavigation, but this is the second collapse that ours has suffered with far less use than that. I think Galactic might be a bit too big/too fast for the design. That would be a far harder at-sea fix than the main, as getting at the problem means standing on the jupe and pulling out little bits and bobs while the sea swirls around your hands. We'll trust the autopilot to see us through, though I hate burning diesel to make enough electricity to run it (the one of our two wind generators which has chronic problems is down again). And there is a persistent thumping noise from somewhere in the steering gear that led me to make an exploratory dive on the rudder in Ascension.
Oh, and the telescoping whisker pole that I've repaired in South Africa, St. Helena and Ascension? That made it through about two hours of use this time around before breaking again. I'm going to have to talk to Forespar when we reach the Caribbean.
So, there's that background noise of *stuff* in the sailing life. For a lot of sailors and a lot of sailing blogs, this nuts-and-bolts stuff is the foreground, it's the whole point of sailing. Me, I try everything that I can to ignore it all, even as it takes up half of my time and half of my thought. Dealing with the non-romantic reality of how things work is the price that you have to pay to go sailing, and anyone who voyages successfully in their own boat has become adept at it. But it isn't newsworthy, and it surely isn't anything to do with a dance.
That dance, something like that dance that Auden is referring to above, that's what I think of as motivating our favorites among the people we meet sharing this sailing with us.
That dance has more to do with marveling at sharks that were longer than our dinghy, hanging around the pier at Ascension Island.
It has to do with sailing long enough to learn that the western tropical South Atlantic is quite unreliable for green flash sunsets at wintertime, and surmising that the responsible haze might have something to do with the vast steaming bulk of Amazonia, over which the sun sets for us each evening.
It very much might have something to do with sailing across, and much of the length of, the South Atlantic Ocean for no other reason than the fact that you've wandered so far and so long that it lies between you and home, or wherever your home used to be.
So that's what we're about just now. We've left Ascension a few days ago and are bound for Curacao, a Dutch island just north of Venezuela and conveniently out of the hurricane zone. Shortest distance makes it about 3600 miles, and for various reasons that have nothing to do with sailing and everything to do with how we pay for it, we might have a go at doing the entire passage in one whack. Unless we can make contact with our oldest sailing friends of all, who we think are in French Guiana, and who we very much would like to see if we can raise them via email.
After all, they are dancing the same dance as us.
~~
This post was sent via our high-frequency radio as we're far from internet range. Pictures to follow when we reach internet again. We can't respond to comments for now, though we do see them all!
Not to be born is the best for man
The second best is a formal order
The dance's pattern, dance while you can.
Dance, dance, for the figure is easy
The tune is catching and will not stop
Dance till the stars come down with the rafters
Dance, dance, dance till you drop.
-W.H. Auden, "Death's Echo"
I have been thinking occasionally and lately about the inadvisability of a "family sailing blog".
Not that I'm considering pulling the plug on Twice In A Lifetime. This has been the very delight of a pastime for me over the past nine years, the garden that I can tend who has neither patience nor earth for literal gardening.
I'm just thinking of how much of our time, both at sea and in port, devolves into the daily intimacies of family life lived in occasional isolation and permanently close association, and how this sort of living doesn't always necessarily make for newsworthy blog copy.
It might not be an accident that some of the most-read family sailing blogs appear to be written by people who got as far as a Caribbean marina, where they sit and blog authoritatively about the sailing life.
But, our news: We are sailing towards Brazil under jib alone. (Elias just spotted a storm petrel.) The main had a bad time yesterday and is therefore on deck just now. The grommet holding the luff to one of the mast cars ripped, and the 5200 that will hold on the elaborately-engineered repair will have to cure before the sail can again be set. One of the boxes that attach the battens to the mast cars also exploded, which made me very happy that in South Africa I finally bought three replacement boxes of a better design than the awful Schaefer boxes that came with the boat. We like the durability of a full-batten main, but when it's time to replace this sail a sailmaker will have to convince us that they have a better way to handle the luff attachments that give us chronic trouble.
While Elias and I were replacing the batten box the windvane decided that it had had enough. It's a model that is boldly warranted to last for a circumnavigation, but this is the second collapse that ours has suffered with far less use than that. I think Galactic might be a bit too big/too fast for the design. That would be a far harder at-sea fix than the main, as getting at the problem means standing on the jupe and pulling out little bits and bobs while the sea swirls around your hands. We'll trust the autopilot to see us through, though I hate burning diesel to make enough electricity to run it (the one of our two wind generators which has chronic problems is down again). And there is a persistent thumping noise from somewhere in the steering gear that led me to make an exploratory dive on the rudder in Ascension.
Oh, and the telescoping whisker pole that I've repaired in South Africa, St. Helena and Ascension? That made it through about two hours of use this time around before breaking again. I'm going to have to talk to Forespar when we reach the Caribbean.
So, there's that background noise of *stuff* in the sailing life. For a lot of sailors and a lot of sailing blogs, this nuts-and-bolts stuff is the foreground, it's the whole point of sailing. Me, I try everything that I can to ignore it all, even as it takes up half of my time and half of my thought. Dealing with the non-romantic reality of how things work is the price that you have to pay to go sailing, and anyone who voyages successfully in their own boat has become adept at it. But it isn't newsworthy, and it surely isn't anything to do with a dance.
That dance, something like that dance that Auden is referring to above, that's what I think of as motivating our favorites among the people we meet sharing this sailing with us.
That dance has more to do with marveling at sharks that were longer than our dinghy, hanging around the pier at Ascension Island.
It has to do with sailing long enough to learn that the western tropical South Atlantic is quite unreliable for green flash sunsets at wintertime, and surmising that the responsible haze might have something to do with the vast steaming bulk of Amazonia, over which the sun sets for us each evening.
It very much might have something to do with sailing across, and much of the length of, the South Atlantic Ocean for no other reason than the fact that you've wandered so far and so long that it lies between you and home, or wherever your home used to be.
So that's what we're about just now. We've left Ascension a few days ago and are bound for Curacao, a Dutch island just north of Venezuela and conveniently out of the hurricane zone. Shortest distance makes it about 3600 miles, and for various reasons that have nothing to do with sailing and everything to do with how we pay for it, we might have a go at doing the entire passage in one whack. Unless we can make contact with our oldest sailing friends of all, who we think are in French Guiana, and who we very much would like to see if we can raise them via email.
After all, they are dancing the same dance as us.
~~
This post was sent via our high-frequency radio as we're far from internet range. Pictures to follow when we reach internet again. We can't respond to comments for now, though we do see them all!
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