yacht delivery : writing : photography : adventure
Just came off watch. We’re roaring along @ upwards of 8 knots at times, thanks again to a favorable current. Still north of Georges Bank but not by much – and ‘Sune the Driver’ keeps wanting to go East. Contemplated having a rum drink, but decided against it.
Crawled out of bed and began what is already (and too soon) a long process of dressing. Still in my shorts (of the quick-dry adventure variety, of course), under my foulie pants, which are nearly useless by now – they’re wetter inside than out. Longsleeve tight top, fleece, jacket and Turtlefur hat (though I was a bit warm this morning).
1000: Okay, interrupted there by some more action. We’re running under staysail alone now @ 6-7 knots. The sun came out and with it came more wind. The seas have evened out a bit. Mia was on watch when the rudder on the vane popped off a second time today. Good thing for that safety line. Apparently the boat doesn’t like running under mainsail alone. |
| Saga 43 Sailplan |
 |
| ARC Europe Route |
It’s Halloween. A small kid dressed like a skeleton tried to scare me while I was running earlier. I scared him back. Now my calves are tired.
I’m drinking my dinner tonight. At ‘The Taphouse,’ the only lively place in Hampton on a Sunday night apparently. We’re stuck here until at least Friday, but I’m consoled because I’m getting paid to be here.
I’ve been organizing my computer and re-reading some old journals and stuff I’ve written before. It’s slightly unfortunate that I seem to have lost the ability to write solely for the sake of writing. I’ve lost some innocence I had when I didn’t ‘have’ to write – when I could sit down and write only because I had something to write about. I just read an entry titled “Remembering the Future,” and I do remember it because it was written when I was in Prague. It’s strange how that month-long experience seemed depressing and unnecessary at the time – when was I ever going to use that? – but now, looking back, it was one of the most enlightening experiences of my life.
The waitress who is serving me my liquid dinner is dressed in spaceship pajamas. It’s Halloween, so this is okay. She is also pretty, which is also okay.
Beer #3 has been ordered. How do you go back? Obviously you can’t. But to a state of mind? Maybe. ‘Taking on responsibility, knowing it will weigh you down. Freedom is a possibility only if you’re able to say no.’ They are playing awesome music in this here Taproom. I am enjoying myself, right? Right. But in a way different from before.
They say you can never go home. You can always go home. But you can never go back. You can never go back to that first time you left home, that experience of what it was like to be out on your own, exploring the world for the first time, open eyes and an open mind. Of how everything was different everyday, including yourself. Of how there were no responsibilities beyond what was right in front of you, ultimate freedom. It’s freaking depressing and inspiring at the same time thinking like this. It’s inspiring because I have a feeling I can get that feeling back, but depressing because I already know what it’s like. It’s the real world, it’s such a bummer.
But why am I complaining? I’m getting paid to do nothing for a week, and then I’m getting paid double to go sailing, which is unbelievable. But I have an inkling it would be more satisfying to go sailing on my own boat and get paid to do crappy work, knowing that you can set off at any time as soon as the kitty is full up again, not be obligated to anything or anyone, not be ‘known’ by anything or anyone and just go exploring.
This music is awesome. ‘We used to wait’ by the Arcade Fire just came on.
‘Standing in the wilderness downtown….Now our lives are changin’ fast…hope that something pure can last.’
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.
