Sailing to Africa 2008 Blue: light, powder, turquoise, deep. Water. Sky. White: sand. clouds. Green: coconut palm trees covering atolls. White sand plumed from the anchor as he winched it up through twenty feet of transparent water. The trade wind, blowing hard over the reef between Direction and Home Islands pushed the 37’ sloop back, as he knew it would, away from nearby coral heads. When the anchor reached the bow roller, he temporarily secured it, and made his way aft to the tiller, where he turned GANNET and engaged the tiller pilot to steer while he returned to the bow to unshackle the anchor from its chain. On short passages he often left the anchor on the bow, but not for four thousand miles, Back in the cockpit, he unfurled the jib and turned north out the pass. Cocos was a pretty place, a half a dozen small atolls, white sand and palm trees, fringing a five mile wide turquoise lagoon; but, as always, he was glad to get back to sea. For half an hour he sailed north, until when he was clear of the reef off Harburgh Island on the other side of the lagoon, he turned west for Durban, five weeks away he estimated. He was one of the world’s most experienced sailors; usually he was right. A mid-morning shower drove him briefly into the cabin, where he secured a few clinking cans and stuffed bits of paper towel to keep cups from rattling; but then the sky brightened and he went back on deck until the evenly spaced low white puffs of trade wind cloud were overcome by solid overcast spreading from the west, and the wind increased to twenty-five and then thirty knots. The GANNET sailed with power, cutting across the faces of six foot waves under her jib alone. When one off those waves broke over the stern, he engaged the self-steering vane, more powerful and reliable than the tiller pilot, and went back below. ---------- Gray: pewter, slate, steel. Sea and sky. White: foaming wake; breaking waves. Black: impenetrable; obsidian. NIght sky and sea. For a week and a thousand miles he remained mostly in the cabin, reading, writing, listening to music, as winds reaching low gale force drove the sloop before them. A few times the wind overpowered the self-steering vane, spinning GANNET beam on to waves that swept her deck, and he had to pull himself up the deeply angled companionway ladder to the cockpit and roll in more of the jib to regain control. This near the Equator--Cocos is only 12º South and by the end of that first week he had angled down to 17º South--the water was warm and it was quicker to strip off his shorts and go out naked than to put on foul weather gear. One night he awoke to find the boat moving so smoothly that he thought she had slowed, and went on deck to see the full moon shining as GANNET skipped across waves like a smooth stone thrown on a pond. The wind had dropped to twenty knots, and the sloop was synchronized with the waves, until just when he moved to the stern to check the control lines from the self-steering vane, one came from abeam, and heeled the boat over more than 40º. Instinctively he grabbed the backstay and found himself hanging far out over the ocean, looking calmly down at black water that seemed as hard as lava, before the boat righted itself. He was aware that to lose his grip was to die. He was sixty-six years old, but still strong. And he had often come closer. Once he had written, “Almost dying is a hard way to make a living.” People ashore now assumed he was retired; but he was still doing what he always had. He did not lead a life from which one retired. A full week of bad weather in those latitudes in August is unusual, but he moved west through a grey and black world, sea and sky, slate and pewter, broken by only a few hours of sunshine and moonlight. It wasn’t what he expected, but he didn’t mind. The miles were slipping astern. GANNET had sustained no damage. Everything, mostly, was under control. ---------- Blue: deep, royal, pure. Sea and sky. White: cresting waves, foaming wake. Silver: moonlit sea. Star filled sky. A thousand hard and fast miles the first week were followed by a thousand easy and fast miles the second. The sky cleared, the trade wind returned, and he raised the mainsail for the first time. GANNET sailed beautifully, in perfect balance, broad reaching across the Indian Ocean. Looking at the top of the chart he saw that he had already passed south of all of India and was below Pakistan. Two thousand miles below. He was glad to be able to spend time on deck again. Often he had a morning cup of coffee there, and returned in the afternoon when he could protect his skin, which had been exposed to far too much sunlight, by sitting in the shade oft the sails, listening to music on the cockpit speakers. He ate his dinners of freeze dry meals into which he poured boiling water--lamb and peas; spaghetti; chicken stew--from a measuring cup in the cockpit at sunset. There were two Wedgwood plates carefully secured in the galley, but they were only used when his wife joined him in port, as she had a month earlier in Bali. Having settled into passage routine in the monastery of the sea, already it seemed more distant. He expected to see her again when he flew back to the United States after reaching Durban. Although there was a known leak in one of his two water tanks, he had enough fresh water to fill a solar shower bag and leave it on deck for the sun to heat. On his very first ocean passage decades earlier from San Diego to Tahiti, he had let his beard grow; but it itched fiercely and he shaved it off the first day in port. Even in storms he shaved every second or third day at sea; but a warm freshwater shower in the cockpit was a luxury. He changed into clean shorts and t-shirt afterwards that still smelled of Balinese soap. As GANNET moved steadily west at six and seven knots, averaging one hundred and fifty to one hundred and sixty miles each day, the trade winds slowly weakened, and he maintained speed by setting more sail. a big white asymmetrical cruising spinnaker captured the lighter breeze and steadied the boat against low waves coming from the southeast and a long, higher swell rolling up from the Southern Ocean. He had spent more than a year down there in the Forties and Fifties on three different voyages. That he would return once more to Cape Horn was always in his mind. A few of those swells were almost twenty feet high, though with gradual slopes not dangerous. From their tops, briefly he looked down at the surrounding ocean as on a meadow from a hill. But then the swell would pass and GANNET slide down its trailing side. Almost always he was on deck at sunset, and then he usually went back below to listen to the radio. After dark he could pick up the Voice of America, the BBC and Radio Australia even in mid-ocean. For several nights he tuned in to BBC coverage of the Beijing Olympics; and then, sometimes, the VOA live from the Democrat Convention. When he first started crossing oceans only thirty-five years earlier, his radio receiver was a Zenith TransOceanic the size of a small suitcase, powered by nine D cell batteries, whose essential purpose was to get precise time signals. Navigation then was by sextant and not much changed from Captain Cook’s voyages. Every three second error in timing a sextant sight results in a one mile error in a position line at the Equator. The Sony he used now was the size of a paperback and needed only four AA batteries. It could still get time signals and he still had a sextant aboard, but GPS had made them obsolete. Even when on land, he was not tied closely to the world. Independently poor, he had not worked for anyone else for more than thirty years. He had lived outside hierarchies and systems and refused to let anyone else define or control him. At sea the six billion other people on the planet become even more remote, and the news over the radio could have come from outer space. Sometimes he listened to it; sometimes not. And always, for more than thirty years, it was the same: people were killing one another and politicians uttered self-serving banalities. One evening toward the end of the second week, when GANNET was just below 20º South, he changed from shorts and t-shirt into Levis and a long sleeved shirt and went back on deck with a crystal glass of Laphroaig, which he sipped while listening to Gorecki’s THIRD SYMPHONY, the “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs,” as GANNET slipped through a soft night. Halfway through the second movement, there came a rare and unsuspected moment: the soprano’s voice reached a note of pellucid beauty that nudged the waves of the ocean, the waves of her voice, the waves of light emitted by stars billions of years ago, all the vibrating waves of matter seen and unseen, into fleeting perfect harmony; and GANNET slid down one wave and sailed up the next into a parallel universe. There was only the slightest, almost imperceptible pause in the soprano’s voice, which he attributed to a loose speaker wire, and a tiny tinkle as a crack appeared in the crystal glass he held in his left hand, which he did not notice in the dark. ---------- Translucent. Transparent. Invisible. A fine trade wind day. The GANNET’s motion was easy, and so he crawled aft into the stern to trace the cable from the GPS antenna to the chartplotter, as well as the wires to the cockpit speakers, but without discovering the fault in either. The speakers seemed to be working properly; but the chartplotter couldn’t establish a position. Concluding that the antenna mounted on the stern pulpit had failed, he took the two small handheld GPS units he carried for back-up from the chart table, and was surprised when after searching for a half hour neither of them came up with a position either. That all three had failed at the same time was unlikely without the boat being struck by lightning or passing through an enormously strong magnetic field; but it seemed to have happened. He changed batteries in the handheld units, moved them to different parts of the boat. The entire GPS system must be down. This was unprecedented; but he was not unduly worried. He was in mid-ocean, far from even a speck of land. Eventually one of the units would start working again, and if it didn’t, he still had the sextant. The other instruments were still functioning, and for several days, each noon he entered a dead reckoning position in the steno pad he used for the ship’s log. But each day it seemed to matter less, less than his distress one night at finding that his last crystal glass was cracked. Heavy, smooth, cool in his hand, he could still drink from it and did; but he had always been careful with that glass and didn’t understand the crack. Fine day followed fine day. He had always loved settling into the natural rhythms of a long passage: dawn and sunset; wind; arching sails; waves. After all these years and miles and waves, millions of waves, he still found fascination in watching them pass, facets constantly changing, shifting, reflecting sunlight and moon. That there was something different about this sea, he sensed more than thought. He couldn’t put it into words, and as the perfect days passed, gradually he forgot about it. He also stopped trying the GPS units every day. The GANNET’s position didn’t seem to matter. One day he checked the leaking water tank, which should have run dry, but hadn’t, and found it still half-full. Each dawn he drank two cups of coffee on deck . Each morning he read and wrote in the cabin. Each afternoon he returned to listen to music on deck. Each evening he ate a freeze dry dinner in the cockpit, not noticing that the provision locker remained full. Most nights he stayed on deck for an hour or two, often sipping Laphroaig from a cracked crystal glass. The world to which he had never been closely tied and which always faded when he went to sea, gradually became translucent, transparent, then vanished completely from his mind as he sailed endlessly toward an Africa that was not there.