Saturday, June 26,
2010: One forty-nine AM.
It’s one forty-nine in the morning. I write from the nav
table of Truant, the 47’ Cabo Rico
cutter that Mia and I are currently in the process of delivering from the
Delaware Bay to Newport, Rhode Island. Between the full moon shining through
the pilothouse window and the glow of my computer screen, there is enough light
to write by.
I just finished my second cup of hot cocoa, and am now
burping up the curry that we ate for dinner last night. My watch began at one
am, when Mia woke me from a deep sleep, disoriented and not wanting in the
slightest to get out of bed. She was waiting, however, with my first cup of
cocoa, and I loved her for it.
There is a bright star just off to starboard, low on the
horizon. I don’t have my almanacs with me, but I suspect it’s not a star at
all, but Venus, who is sometimes the morning star, sometimes the evening star,
but always the brightest in the sky. This is very interesting, writing about
all this as it’s happening. I often must wait, writing about these little
adventures after the fact. This one is a particularly benign adventure,
however, this particular boat having more luxuries than the house I grew up in.
Not only am I able to power my laptop through it’s electric inverter, but I was
actually able to take a stand-up shower yesterday evening, hot water and all
(incidentally, the real shower I had yesterday afternoon could never match the
refreshment and joy we felt swimming in the ocean while Sunrise lay hove-to on our last trip. A shower in the clean
saltwater will always trump the ‘real’ thing). The pilothouse is almost absurd
on a boat less than fifty feet long – the leather captain’s chair I’m sitting
in could be off a megayacht, and indeed the large windows complete with
windshield wipers I peer through every ten minutes or so to look for boats feel
like they belong on a much larger ship.
Before I began typing I perched myself aft in the
companionway with my chocolate and stared at the moon for a while. It’s full
tonight, and basks a chilly glow on the calm surface of the sea below, light
enough to glimpse the distant horizon and remind me to take a look outside
every once in a while, not for boat traffic but to remember why it is I like
this sort of thing.
…
We steamed out of the Cohansey river on the Delware Bay
Thursday night, making it nearly a full two hundred yards before I realized I’d
left my cell phone on the floor of the car we’d rented and driven down from
Reading. We swung round, the stiff current now carrying us back toward the
dock, and I shouted to Ted onshore, who I was afraid had already left, to grab
it for me. It was tricky maneuvering the boat close enough to the dock to
retrieve my phone without actually touching the dock, for the current was
swirling and the unfamiliar boat felt huge, much larger than it’s 47’ length.
With a deft toss from Ted and soft hands from me, I caught my phone and
accelerated again, this time for good.
Just as the sun sank in the west we excited the river, onto
the Bay proper, clearing the crab pots in the remaining dusk and finding the
ships channel, which we’d follow to the mouth of the Bay at Cape May. It was
further than I’d allowed for, and we didn’t get offshore until after two am.
I’d wanted to remain awake through the shallows of the bay and the several
doglegs of the ships channel. We were making only four knots over the ground,
bucking the current as the tidal waters swelled into the Bay. Ships coming the
other direction appeared from nowhere, the same tide so foul to us sweeping
them along effortlessly. Finally we were in the ocean proper and I collapsed in
the bunk that Mia had kept warm for me. I slept straight through to seven am,
while a recharged Mia endured the last hours of darkness and was fully awakened
by a clear sunrise.
…
This is the second of two Newport deliveries this week
alone. The last was aboard a real sailing boat, a Corbin 39 that was on it’s
way to Gibraltar. My mom and dad finally got to come along together, and the
four of us sailed Sunrise north to
New England while her Romanian owner waited patiently in Russia, eager to hear
our progress. That trip was just as calm as the one I’m on currently, but with
a full suit of sails and an eager boat, we ghosted along through the ether at
night, not wanting to crank the diesel unless absolutely necessary. We made
Newport in a leisurely three and a half days from Annapolis, enjoying a swim en
route. Once north of New York City, my dad began to see whales. We thought he
was joking or losing it, but after a few hours staring blankly at the horizon,
we began to notice the telltale spout in the distance, and started to see for
ourselves. It amazes me how full of life the ocean can be, not fifty miles from
one of the biggest cities on earth, a city that to me represents all that we’ve
lost from the natural world, yet right on it’s doorstep reside some of Earth’s
most majestic creatures. One of them, in an apparent effort to impress us,
spouted and abruptly dove, his tail breaking the surface for a long second,
waving goodbye, before disappearing.
Just this afternoon we sailed through a large school of
porpoises. I thought I noticed a splash at the stern, and soon after a dozen or
so black and white porpoises, smaller and faster than the grey bottlenose
dolphins we’d gotten acquainted with the in the Caribbean, lept towards the
boat in a frenzy, taking station on the bow. Mia and I ran forward, no time to
grab the camera (for that would have ruined it anyway), and we sat on the
bowsprit as the playful mammals spoke to us. If you listen, the echo-soundings
the dolphins make to talk to one another are readily audible to us humans. They
stayed for several minutes, and in an instant one decided to make a sharp
ninety-degree turn and the others followed, disappearing faster than they’d
arrived.
…
We’ll make our landfall at Block Island tomorrow sometime,
and be moored in Newport shortly thereafter, a full day ahead of schedule. Truant feels like a motor yacht on the
inside, and I’ve come to treat it like one on the outside. This boat would need
a gale to really get moving, and even still, the complex hydraulic transmission
on the big John Deer diesel requires that it remain running at all times, so we
wouldn’t really be sailing anyway. I resigned myself to this fact, and have
treated the boat like a motorsailor since we left Cape May. Though the sails
were pulling hard yesterday morning, the minute we dropped below seven knots I
throttled up the big engine, and it’s been pulling even harder ever since. The
constant whine heard from our cabin back aft actually helps me sleep, and I’ll
be grateful for the extra day during the long drive home on Sunday, and
ultimately my return to work on Monday (though it’s admittedly a wonderful
feeling knowing that technically, as I write this, I am at work).
Not long ago Mia popped her head up from our cabin down
below. I didn’t see her in the dark, and didn’t hear her for the noise of the
engine and she scared the daylights out of me. She was sleepwalking again (she
did this on the Corbin when my parents were on watch, “just checking,” on what,
only she knows). I told her to go back to sleep and she did, only very confused
when she woke and realized she wasn’t in her bunk. What goes on in that brain
of hers I’d like to know sometimes.
My motivation is leaving me for the time being. There are
two ships on the horizon, one off the starboad bow and the other astern, so
I’ll have to pay a bit sharper attention in these last hours before the
sunrise. I’ll return now to that book about pirates that I found on Ted’s
shelf. Perhaps more later.
…
Four Twenty-Three AM
My watch is almost over, but I think I’ll let Mia sleep a
bit longer. The first light of the rising sun is just starting to creep into
the Eastern horizon, blending the ocean and the sky into a singular,
indistinguishable blue. It’s still flat calm, we’re still motoring. A fishing
boat has been parelelling our course since I woke at one, and has finally
passed us on our starboard side. I almost ran headlong into a weather buoy, only
noticing it’s blinking yellow light after we’d already slid past; lucky for me.
The lights of land on Montauk have been visible for an hour
or so, and we should see Block Island by early morning. This trip has been
markedly faster than the last, which is both a good and bad thing. Good,
because I need to get back home and back to work, yet bad because it’s
essentially been a motorboating trip. I miss the peace and quiet we enjoyed
while making five knots under spinnaker, staysail and mainsail on Sunrise. The motor helps me sleep, but
not as deeply as the pure sound of water rushing along the hull of a sailing
boat.
Quotes of quotes from
Alvah Simon’s North to the Night:
“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy,
the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness.
Concerning all acts of initiative and creation there is
one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills
countless ideas and splendid plans:
That the moment one definitely commits oneself,
then Providence moves too.
All sorts of things occur to help one
that would never otherwise have occurred.
A whole stream of events issue from the decision,
raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents
and meetings and material assistance,
which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”
-Goethe’s Faust
“And so I tell myself again: I am here because in the
landscape of each and every human imagination lies one special place. Our inner
compass keeps pointing us toward this spot, which is magnetic, mysterious,
exotic, and alluring, but, alas, always fringed by a frontier of our fears.
Still, it is to this specific place that we are compelled to travel in order to
know ourselves and, in so doing, call our lives complete.
I am here in search of wholeness, for in my breast, hiding
just beneath each breath, lies a hollow, and always it has cried out to be
filled.”
-Alvah Simon, North to
the Night
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