An excerpt from my written journal:
February 6th, 4:00 PM ... and then the clouds over a shoreline silhouetted with trees against a golden horizon, struck through with lances of sunbeams, show that nature is indeed still capable of reaching me with its beauty. There was a new observation for me on the nuance of hue across waves. The other day, I enjoyed being able to look port and starboard to see two different reflections, under clear blue stretching out versus dark grey under clouds. But around 3 PM, the exact line of those two scenes in motion traversed our wake, so that, looking astern, stretching back as far as I could see, the upslope of waves on one side rose in swells of slate that dappled at their crest in pits and pulses with an azure that overtook it to run down the other.
And all run through with veins of gold.
Being able to observe light and color the surface of water, the fluid dynamism of that trio’s interplay, is my one of my favorite visual phenomena, rivalled only by wind as it breathes through autumn foliage or runs across a high grown meadow. And, when I think about it, fire as well. But the constituent parts (shifting light, motion, colour) are the same across all three.
A poem from my collection that speaks to water and light, if I may be permitted another digression before the travelogue proper:
72. Mallets Bay Little whitecaps on the bay unrolled, Gilt brilliant angled in the setting sun. They roil out briefly in displays of gold The fortune of today before it’s done. Such blue the azure sky in water lays Imbues its essence there as tribute hue; Spreads low the vaulted high – a mirror’s praise Reflects in passing eyes that catch the view. - December 13th, 2020
Anyhoo! Where was I? Ah yes, to reiterate in an official capacity:
0830 – Set the staysail and double-reefed main.
This passage, which took about a day and half to the roughly two of the previous transit, opened with a morning of occasional 5 foot swells in 17 knot winds as we crossed the Delaware Bay. Sea sickness was not to strike me again, even though the waves were bobbing us around as much or more than on the way down to Cape May. Hopefully, this is a life long inoculation.
When the wind seemed like it was dying down late in the afternoon, we ran up the jib and shook a reef out of the main. This was apparently a signal to the elements and they kicked up again immediately. So, we took the jib back down and then the main entirely. But it was a good drill.
That evening, I began Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, an impulse purchase in Rhode Island. Serendipitously, one of the principle characters is a man who, disenchanted with life at sea and turning 34 the coming May, leaves sailing behind to become a husband. With this April being my 34 on the horizon, it’s an interesting juxtaposition.
My night watch, starting at 2 AM on the 7th, included constant warnings from the coast guard about live fire exercises being conducted the next day by the navy (imagining what it would be like to hear artillery begin and realizing I’d misunderstood the timeframe of the “get and stay the Hell away”) and a boat without AIS coming up way faster than I had expected them to, waking Tripp up later than I should have to inform him (where he instructed me, with a fair amount of patience, to disengage the tiller autopilot, and to “maybe wake me up before they’re on top of us next time”).
By this point, the wind had died down enough that we were motoring, with the jib and staysail up in a Yossarian’s not-quite-jaundice limbo of leaving them to maybe do something if the wind became more favorable or to take them down if it became less.
Then we had an engine issue at 3:30 AM that thankfully looked more disastrous than it actually was. It began to chug like, to my novice ear, it had on the way from Portsmouth while getting vapor locked. But the smell of exhaust was a new element that had me rouse Tripp, who instructed me to “SHUT IT OFF”. A minute from noise to killing it and a cloud of exhaust and steam dumped out of the hatch when it was open. I could see the cogs turning in Tripp’s head as he tried to figure out what the issue might be, how disastrous it was. But, thankfully, all that had happened was the muffler had shook its fasteners look, coming off at the exit point and allowing sea water to spray onto the hot engine. And the exhaust smell was simply because it had had nowhere else to go. Tripp seine twined a temporary fix to the manifold and everything was right as rain. Well, save that the man now had to miss more sleep and lament that his engine compartment had been reduced from “space station” cleanliness” to “coal mine”.
This incident increased my vigilance or paranoia regarding the sound of the engine. Which is it, Schrodinger? You don’t know until the aftermath. Well, that coin was tossed at one point and I killed the engine, which flipped Tripp out of his bunk like a vet with PTSD hearing Charlie. Fortunately, the coin landed on “vigilant” and it turned out the lines did, indeed, need to be bled of air.
When my watch ended, I was tired enough to actually fall asleep for two straight hours. This despite my bunk being next to the running engine and the loss of ear plugs Tripp had bought in Portsmouth to an unfortunate heel, which had sent the open package into diesel and pooled condensation that collects under the navigation table in an area now dubbed a Super Betrayer zone (Tripp: “I guess that’s why that stupid step used to be there.)
Two of the journey’s sleep-deprived comedic crescendos bookended that end-of-watch nap. At 7:10 AM, I made Tripp a deluxe breakfast wrap of a dry pita and summer sausage and offered to make him coffee to go with it. He took the French Press I handed up to him in the cockpit to shake the grounds out overboard and after one, two, three, vigorous flicks the glass container in the press slipped out of the handle into the Atlantic. There was a moment of total stillness from the man, with his arm frozen in position at the bottom of the movement that had cost us the morning’s coffee, where even from behind I could read in his body language the absolute affront of such a cosmic insult. And then the laughter began and did not conclude on my part for awhile.
Then, at about 9:15, after Tripp had woken me up to see “the scene from The Birds” we were sailing through along the bridge at the mouth of the Chesapeake, the two of us were again broken into delirium by the appreciation of wind that was actually warm and the realization that both of us had repressed the memory of being snowed on the night after we left Point Judith.
It occurred to me then that I hadn’t even written about how cold it had been in the first blog entry. And, dear reader, it was cold. And there is no heating system aboard the Callipygia, unless you count ambient heat from the Isuzu or the weird smelling alcohol stove (I encourage you not to count these negligible sources of comfort. I was bundled for ice fishing for 48 hours straight, sleeping in the same layers I wore several years ago in an off-grid cabin when the kerosene heater died on a 15 degree night. The fact both of us had completely forgotten this fact for nearly a week was a rib tickler.
To repost the re-enactment from the video log catch-up:
This has run overlong, I do believe. So, I’ll leave us for now at the mouth of the Chesapeake and detail Norfolk later today or tomorrow.
Hermit Thrush 