Overhead the sky still swirls with torn grey clouds while below a decaying leftover chop laps at the hull as our three-cylinder diesel ticks over another hour on the meter. The wind died with the sunrise, and now at mid-morning we are actually closing in. Moroccan highlands stretch off to the south, and the bold ranges of the Iberian peninsula form an imposing sight straight ahead. We slowly pass a handful of small fishing boats, plying their ware into the sea, long-accustomed to working here, one the world’s most celebrated waterways. But we are all butterflies and photographs. After ten days of lonely sea we suddenly find ourselves feeling pinched between the masses of two continents. We join the marching parade of triangles on our chart plotter screen, round the last bit of Spanish headland, and enter the Straits of Gibraltar.
We made it! Over the past two months we’ve spent 37 days at sea, and in that time we traversed the Atlantic, crossing some 4000 nautical miles of open ocean. An endless undulation of waves and clouds and stars and wind and salt.
So I’ve had a lot of time to think, and therefore you’d think I’d have something to write. But truth of the matter is I feel a bit dazed and sheepish. There’s something about the constant motion; the cyclic rise and fall of the sea; the ebb and flow of the days turned to nights back to days. It does something to your mind. It opens veins of wandering contemplation, but it also softens the corners of concentrated thought.
Small details balloon and shrink with meaning and import in disproportional ways. Mundane tasks can require overwhelming effort, while imposing forces of nature can seem benign and manageable. Life becomes a sort of inverse bizarro world, the negative of a photograph, everything in its right place yet all of it unfamiliar. Daily actions full of routine redundancy yet incessantly other-worldly. All of this occurring on a small craft, your entire living space exhausted in a matter of steps, but your vision limited only by the curvature of the earth. The days, like the planet itself, spin oblong circles around an off kilter axis.
No different than many aspiring sailors before me, I took to the writings of such greats as Sir Francis Chichester, Joshua Slocum, and my personal favorite, Bernard Moitessier. Reading their vivid accounts of seemingly endless time spent at sea inspired the expectation that wide open blue water ocean crossing is where to find the marrow of life. That once you’re out there in it, in truly the most wild spaces left on the planet, time will cease to exist and the complexity of our universe will pale and become graspable. Lofty ideals indeed, but when you read these works so seems the natural result of ocean sailing.
Well perhaps we didn’t spend quite enough time at sea, ha.
Look, I have no regrets, on the contrary even. Sailing across an ocean has been on my bucket-list for most my life. I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. And the fact that I was able to do so with my partner, by ourselves, on our own boat…well all the better. But whereas at one point I thought I may want to toss the anchor overboard and take “The Long Way” through life, pursing a never ending horizon on a boat that never stops…I think now I appreciate land more than ever.
That said, the dust of the whole experience is only just beginning to settle and who knows how I may feel in a month’s time. For now, I’m just infatuated with climbing stairs, eating ice cream, and running hot water taps.
Thank you Poseidon for the safe passage, and thank you terra firma for being on the other side.