Wild nights

Non-sailing friends and even a few who’ve been on boats often ask, ‘What do you do at night – do you stop?’

The question isn’t so hard to understand. You imagine us rumbling across the ocean in our little shell, then seeing nothing. Besides, we need sleep just like any other human. Even the Cory’s Shearwaters, even restless sharks need to sleep.

But the answer of course is ‘No, we keep going.’ Wherever we are, 10 or 1,000 miles offshore, “Moon River” just keeps trundling along. We have a windvane self-steering mechanism which keeps the rudder straight and the sails are all tied off, so, really, there’s no need for us at all. The ship simply sails onward just as you set her to do back before the sun went down.

Early in our sailing days, Adele and I found nights daunting. On a moonless or, worse, moonless and cloudy night, the sky is so dark that sea and air combine and you can appear to be moving through a vacuum. There are brilliant, star-filled nights when the same sensation occurs: surrounded, almost inundated by stars, you again lose your sense of perspective and it can be hard to understand whether you are sailing level, down, or up right into the astral blizzard.

Tiredness plays terrible tricks, mind-bending and beautiful and cruel at the same time. In exhaustion, I’ve hallucinated that we’re about to sail over a cliff, or into a wall, or down what my addled brain is telling me is a gentle, endless slope of sea. But in this nocturnal hall of mirrors the sailor has to remember always one thing: the sea is flat. Not flat as in the world is flat, since of course the sea is curved; yet flat for practical purposes at least, because you will never fall off any cliff, much less run into a wall, or the stars.

So, basically, with experience you learn to catnap, to conserve your strength, and, above all, to trust your boat to carry you through the kaleidoscope.

Near shore, nighttime watch keeping means scanning the invisible horizon for lights of other boats – cargo ships chiefly and, if you’re on the continental shelf, fishing boats, which often sail erratically, chasing ever-declining quantities of fish, money and time.

Here, watchkeeping is a deadly game. You spot the lights and decipher which direction the ship is taking, how fast, at what angle, and on what business. The different lights tell you everything, once you’ve learnt the codes. A sailing boat also carries characteristic lights and, supposedly, the watchkeeper on the other ship will spot you, just as you spotted him.

But assume nothing at sea. In this game, falling asleep at the wrong time might mean never waking up.

Out of shipping lanes and in waters too deep for most fishermen, the rules change. Nights become magnificently empty. Sure, there’s always a chance of traffic, but most times you’ll be as alone as you can be on this Earth. You don’t even see planes overhead. You have an empty sky above, miles of unseen sea below, and many more miles of water parting ahead.

With the boat steering herself, you feel like a rider on a runaway horse. Or perhaps a prisoner. Or king.

In strong winds in the truly remote places I keep watch not so much for other boats or whales, but for “Moon River” herself. I don’t have to steer. I barely look at the compass – the windvane takes care of all that, keeping us on whatever course we’ve chosen. But I’m listening constantly to the rigging straining, the hull smashing into waves, and the cabin creaking below. Blind I may be, but my ears and body tell me when something unusual is occurring, even a change of wind.

On the good nights, I sit sheltered in the main hatch, my legs inside, my head and shoulders poking out, my perch giving me the sensation of having boarded a chariot. I marvel at the ridiculous wildness of the whole thing, at the stars raging and the wind sweeping us through the sea.

If I’m on watch, that means Adele, Zephyr and Looli are asleep below. Occasionally I’ll climb down into the cabin. The noise there is totally different – at once less and greater. The wind is quiet, but you hear the bulwarks complain and the sails and running rigging work against the mast. Every mechanical noise magnifies alarmingly through the deck.

Trying not to ruin my night vision, I prepare tea and noodles in the eerie blue light of the gas ring (a perk of staying up at night is a Hobbit-like rate of meals). In the dim, squint-inducing glow of the chart table lamp I update the logbook and chart. Then I check that Adele, Zephyr and Looli are snugly encased in their bunks. It’s always hard to believe the girls can sleep through the noise and motion, but they do, barricaded behind lee cloths with their stuffed animals (cat and rabbit for Zephyr; wolf for Looli).

Sometimes, especially when it’s rough, one of the children wakes as I pass. I’ll squeeze her hand in reassurance. Or it might be Adele who wakes, jumping up, asking if it’s already time for her watch. I put my finger to my lips and shake my head. My family's vulnerability -- and strength -- feeds a kind of savage determination in me.

Then squeaking in my boots and foul weather clothing, I climb on deck, and the wind and sea air blast me back into that other place as instantly as if in a spell.

Nights at sea can become otherworldly. You sail under the Milky Way as if it were an arch set up just for you and you watch the constellations slide, practically hissing as they enter the sea. The ocean, unseen, is at once alien and intimate and you know you don’t belong, yet managed to creep in anyway, trespassing in the house of God.

Strangely, it’s may be at night in these wild places that I find myself most connected to my own insignificant little world. The petty hassles of day are washed away – sleep deprivation and the elemental task of watchkeeping take care of that. No one in the world is left except Adele, Zephyr, Looli and the few who live always in my memory. Stripped down like this, there’s time to think, or not even to think, but simply to exist, entirely neutral, like an animal. I see life clearly.

Those moments are my ultimate luxury and usually I want nothing more than to live in them. But last month when we were on a passage between Madeira and the Canary Islands, I felt the unusual urge, quite suddenly, to connect with the world beyond, to share the moment, and perhaps to prove to myself that the other world still existed out there.

This was one of those starry nights, “Moon River” transporting me and my sleeping family through an astounding collision of water and stars. This was a night when nothing from my life could have any meaning at all and yet, for some reason, when that very same transitory, fragile, unimportant existence of mine, that messy patchwork of jobs, friends and loves, seemed suddenly precious. Three months after sailing out of New York harbor, I missed my land life. I wanted to know how my old colleagues at Agence France-Presse were doing, whether the Yankees would make the playoffs, how various love lifes were developing, and a dozen other less-than-galactic, but somehow vital questions.

Firing up the long distance radio, connected by a modem to my laptop, I sent an email to my Agence France-Presse partner in crime Mariano Rolando. I mailed his work address, an email carried improbably by HF waves up to the ionosphere, many miles above, then down to the Big Apple. Magically, Mariano replied back, almost instantly. He was covering a match at the US Tennis Open and was full of good old New York news, gossip, and sports scores.

The exchange – the experience of friendship across time and space – was as miraculous as the night outside.

And when I returned to my perch in Moon River’s main hatch I felt older and younger at the same time.

Somehow just like the stars above.

Nights can be long, but of course the sun also rises. This time off Madeira.

Who’s the savage then?

We humans are always patting ourselves on the back to celebrate our brilliant technological advances and understanding of the world. This voyage to the Sargasso Sea – well, and a few thousand miles around it – is partly to get away from all that.

It’s not always easy. Sailors can be some of the most materialistic people around. They’ll soon bore you to death with lectures on space-age kevlar sailcloth, carbon spars, GPS-radar overlays, and their beloved, electricity-guzzling “systems.”

Thanks to some of that technology, tens of thousands of people can now go to sea in a way that even a couple decades ago, before GPS and EPIRB distress beacons, might have been considered too daunting. Yet despite the gadgets (and partly because of them) there are few sailors – almost none – with even half the expertise, let alone daring, of a Francis Drake or Columbus, seamen whose boats wouldn’t even be legal in some countries today.

So that’s why a stop on “Moon River” at the Ilhas Selvagens, or Savage Islands, was so refreshing.

The Selvagens, ruled by Portugal, are a bunch of arid, barely habitable rocks scattered in the Atlantic between the much bigger islands of Madeira and the Canaries. If you want a high-tech taste of their remoteness, try looking them up on Google maps. You’ll do a lot of zooming.

Zephyr and Looli heading back down to the cove of Selvagem Grande -- with the island's one dog, "Selvagens."

Human life clings tenuously here. Failed attempts at colonization on the largest island, Selvagem Grande, echo in the sad little stone walls and crumbling livestock pens. The only place name here celebrating a supposed historical event – and this one is as unconfirmed as they come -- is Caverna do Capitao Kidd, a large, wet hole where the pirate may or may not have buried treasure.

Portugal keeps two wardens on the main island, occupying a tiny house built in the one decent anchorage, where “Moon River” lay peacefully between surrounding rocks and swirling surf.

Manuel Jose Jesus and his warden colleagues are the humblest of occupants, knowing full well that without outside help they wouldn’t last long. Everything, from water to beer and good Portuguese olives, is brought on the once-every-three-weeks naval ship. Even in dire medical emergency, it would still take a minimum four-hour roundtrip helicopter flight from a base on Porto Santo, an island near Madeira.

“It’s lonely,” Manuel said, although he was not complaining – the last time one of these warden jobs came up, 150 people applied.

Manuel

The house at Selvagem Grande

But the real kings of the archipelago are birds called Cory’s Shearwaters.

Almost 40,000 Shearwaters live on the Selvagens. They face few predators and so are fearless. When we arrived, we found their chicks, which resemble stuffed toys in their woolly down, sitting impassively in a vast collection of tiny hillside caves, while their parents wheel overhead, gathering noisily ahead of fishing trips.

Within a few weeks, those same chicks would finish shedding their juvenile feathers and, after being starved by their parents for a couple weeks, emerge from their caves. Lean and sleek, they’ll be ready – miraculously – for a few flying lessons and the start of a migration half way across the globe into the South Atlantic summer. Next February, some of them will do the whole thing in reverse.

Cory's Shearwater chick -- cute, but awesome 

Mariners have spent millennia perfecting ways to turn masts and canvas into airfoils, but nothing tops the Shearwaters’ long, thin, angular wings, which ride the wind like miniature America’s Cup boats, gliding more than they beat. Similarly, sailors have struggled forever with the need to carry enough drinking water. Shearwaters have an app for that too – special nostrils that desalinate ocean water, allowing them to travel free from land almost indefinitely. Of course their navigational ability, crossing trackless oceans right back to the very nests they were born in, is every bit as good as GPS.

Sailors would do well to stand back in awe of these marvelous travelers, but it hasn’t always been that way.

The Selvagens and their population of Cory’s Shearwaters came under protection of a natural reserve only in 1971, ending many years of human predation. Voyagers came to collect eggs to eat, others to strip the birds of feathers for sale. Selvagem Grande was even used for artillery target practice – you can still find chunks of shrapnel. Between the humans and the rats they probably introduced, there were eventually almost no Shearwaters left.

Today, Shearwaters have reclaimed their fortress in the Atlantic, while Manuel and his comrades resemble mere doormen to a great building – intimately knowledgeable, ready to serve, protective, and present, though not resident.

When the Shearwaters set out this month on their incredible journeys to the coasts of South America and South Africa, the island will fall silent. Manuel says that’s when he really feels the loneliness of his job. When they make the return journey, the pleasure is equal.

“Sometimes we’re annoyed with them because of the noise when we want to sleep and we can’t,” the soft-spoken former soldier said. “But when they’re not here, we feel strange.”

"Moon River," alone in the anchorage.

We were sorry to say goodbye to Manuel. He looked after us with all the enthusiasm of a man stuck on a deserted island. When “Moon River” left, he waved to us, standing on shore alongside his scientist friend Hanny and the island’s pet dog Selvagens.

But we didn’t really have to say goodbye to the Shearwaters: catching the wind south, we were heading even deeper into their home.

The (sea) emperor’s clothes

An apology. On starting this blog I vowed to myself I wouldn’t wander too far from the Sargasso path and into the minutia of daily life that plagues many sailing accounts – you know, the “today we changed the sails and our socks” school of blogging.

But forgive me if I make the occasional digression, starting today with the outwardly dull, but really very crucial issue of foul weather clothing aboard “Moon River.”

Yacht sailors spend enormous amounts of time outside, in all weather, often doing very little beyond staring at the sea. Being on watch is essentially a wetter version of sitting by the fire, a strange, sedentary existence in which your reveries are interrupted by rain, sea spray and the odd proper thumping from a solid wave.

There are two main options for attire.

The most common by far today, and espoused by my brave Adele, is to don breathable Gortex-type fabric used in spiffy looking suits made by Musto, Gill and the like. Outfits sold by these specialist manufacturers are waterproof, supposedly let your body breath, and look good, complete with lots of go-faster Velcro tabs and pockets designed to house every gadget on Earth.

Here is Adele, resplendent:

The other school is modeled by yours truly. This is the same get-up favored among French trawler crews and produced by a company with the unlikely sounding name of Guy Cotten. What they’re really made out of I’m not sure. My jacket is emblazoned with a prominent, enigmatic stamp reading: “no lead.”

My usual get-up. Bullet-proof, or at least waterproof.

I have a lighter orange top for warm weather. Jealous yet?

Now, it’s true that my garb brings to mind clowns, jesters and maybe sweet wrappers. It’s also true that when wrapped in what is essentially rubber you soon get that clammy, cold sensation familiar to anyone who has tried wearing rainboots without socks. And I can't deny that almost no one else on sailing yachts wears the things.

But you stay really, really dry.

Adele laughs at me in my Guy Cottens, even if they are French. Calais is also French, she reminds me. So are those little handbags Frenchmen carry. France can’t be perfect. Yet that’s no reason not to try and dress perfectly.

Such remarks wash off my Guy Cottens much as the Atlantic waves. I don’t laugh at her many-zippered, ergonomically refined finery. But I will register a few facts on the matter:

1. Guy Cottens cost about a fifth of their breathable brethren.

2. They won’t rip.

3. They not only keep you dry but can themselves be dried with the wipe of a towel. Gills and the like stop water getting in, but they themselves become wet on the outside and have to dry out. Not Guy Cotten man. He can come below after a good soaking and simply towel off as if emerging from a shower. The rubber is squeaky dry within half a minute.

I agree there are weaknesses in my get-up. The total lack of pockets (don’t French trawlermen ever listen to iPods, or at least keep their cigarettes somewhere?) is a pain. And in warmer temperatures the lack of air inside your suit can lead to noxious build-up of gases from within – both greenhouse and other.

But to me, no amount of convenience or glamor could top the bulletproof waterproofness of the things.

Now that I’ve already taken this blog down-market, I may as well go all the way with a final anecdote that I believe will persuade you to climb into your very own Guy Cottens. (Editor’s warning: from this point on, the blog may be unsuitable for some adults.)

So, what happened was that during an especially rough night watch in mid-Atlantic this July I found myself eager to pee. Very eager. Of course, even on the best night this involves disrobing, perhaps quickly, and that isn’t necessarily one of Guy Cotten’s strong points, given the absence of those high-tech quick release Velcro straps, convenient zips and all.

This wasn’t the best night. This was a near gale, with “Moon River” sailing beam on to bullying seas, constant spray and water swirling around the deck. Worse, heavy waves sent the boat reeling sideways every few seconds, so that even if I were to disrobe successfully, and avoid getting totally wet, the fraught stage of actually peeing – a bucket at point-blank range being the only feasible target – was alarmingly challenging.

Trying to hold onto the boat with one hand, undo my trawlerman’s duds with the other, and aim for the bucket, which was moving just as erratically as everything else, with the other, was impossible – since that would require three hands. Yet I did my best, grasping here, there, everywhere, and actually, heroically, managing to fulfill a good part of this mission.

Then – and this is all in the dark – came one of those really thumping waves. Over went “Moon River,” over went I, falling hard onto the other side of the cockpit. And, yes, over went the bucket, right over me.

At this point, knocked down and drenched in pee, a man wearing a lesser set of clothing might waver. Who would blame him?

But awash in that salty wasteland, my ridiculous rubber outfit made me a beacon of defiance. Laughing, I rearranged myself, pulled the jacket tight to my throat and stood, much like Odysseus before the mast, calling to the sea.

And the sea soon obliged.

Crash came the next wave. Seawater doused me, washing my Guy Cottens, the cockpit and unfortunate bucket all at once.

I was clean again outside, reborn. Inside, I was as dry as ever.

Clinging on to the boat that night, I even began to wonder if those bright colors didn’t actually look rather good.

Sucked into the Atlantic Garbage Patch

On so many levels the Sargasso Sea is like a whirlpool: literally if you consider the spinning of the North Atlantic Gyre -- and, of course, figuratively.

In the days of sail, it was rumored that this lonely mid-ocean expanse sucked in ships, trapping them in the floating weed. Then in the 20^th century that myth became the Bermuda Triangle, where planes and modern ships would disappear into a time warp.

Popular vision of the Sargasso as a malignant sea -- more dangerous, presumably, than smoking Wills's Cigarettes. Picture courtesy of www.lookandlearn.com

All that’s disproved. But for our unheroic age, we have a third iteration of the whirlpool: a truly monstrous, irresistible force that pulls in floating rubbish and trapping it, like the ships of old, forever.

Environmentalists like to call the Sargasso the “rainforest of the ocean.” And true, this is a marvelous ecosystem with no real parallel. But that rainforest has earned a new name that tells the story of our times: “Atlantic Garbage Patch.”

On our sail through the heart of the Sargasso on “Moon River,” we witnessed both sides.

Golden sargassum weed stretched across Mediterranean-blue waves, their fronds brimming with life: small fish, crabs, shrimps, strings and strings of eggs. Whales were a regular sight.

Yet in this same ultra-clear water, many hundreds of miles from land, we also confronted the astonishing reach of society’s destructiveness.

Everywhere we found detritus from our wasteful, careless world: plastic bottles, what resembled a New York City coffee cup, fishing nets, fishing buoys, a container for motor oil, packaging, and even what might have been a white garden chair.

Huge abandoned plastic buoy from a fishing boat. Ironically, it has attracted several large tripletail fish (just visible to the right). They seem to prefer objects in the water as opposed to open sea and here, hundreds, even thousands of miles from anywhere except Bermuda, they're cozying up to floating rubbish.

Considering how far we were off the beaten track, this all seemed beyond belief. And the real tragedy is that the junk -- jettisoned from ships in the Sargasso, or pulled in by currents from the outside – was going to stay there forever.

The plastic circulates in the currents of the great gyre in exactly the same way as the debris drawn in depictions of the Sea of Lost Ships, that nightmarish, imaginary body of water that collected rotting Roman galleys, Spanish galleons and contemporary vessels alike.

Just as with the similar (and much more publicized) Pacific Garbage Patch, there’s no way to clean up the Atlantic’s floating junk pile.

Beyond the visible garbage, thinly scattered across enormous distances, there is a much greater accumulation of micro plastic to contend with. Fragments are widely enmeshed in the sargassum weed, while even smaller bits, along with their poisonous chemicals, are ingested by fish and so passed right along the food chain – eventually right onto the plates in fancy restaurants.

“The question is, how do you actually clean that? The plastic that is degraded is so small that the only thing we can do now is minimize the new plastic,” said Dr Samia Sarkis, a marine biologist working for the Sargasso Sea Alliance, a Bermuda-based conservation group.

“Reducing plastic is very hard to do,” Sarkis said, chatting aboard “Moon River” when we were anchored in Bermuda’s harbor of Saint George. “And the problem is that the very small particles are very good at concentrating toxins. When you get animals like whales who ingest vast quantities of water and plastic, it’s a huge problem.”

The impossibility of tackling existing garbage is one problem. The other problem is getting everyone who uses the ocean to agree on rules for preventing new pollution. Environmental regulations are often tricky to introduce, but nowhere are they harder than on the high seas – the international waters comprising the largest (and most lawless) area of our planet.

That leaves Bermuda looming significantly in the fight for the Sargasso, since it is the only land that can claim to lie within this mid-ocean sea.

“Bermuda is a place where you can say, ‘I can see what’s there,’” said Philippe Rouja, a prominent marine expert working with the Sargasso Sea Alliance and who is also in charge of Bermuda’s historic shipwrecks.

The high seas part of the ocean, for most people, he said, may as well be “outer space.”

Next March, government ministers and international organizations around the Atlantic are supposed to sign a non-binding declaration of intent to collaborate on protecting the Sargasso.

That may sounds like just talk, but it puts the uncharted Sargasso on the political map. And the Alliance is simultaneously pushing Bermuda’s government to turn a large portion of its own 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone into a marine protection area, or “Blue Halo.” The process starts with public consultations in September and hopes are that the island, in establishing the first Sargasso sanctuary, will encourage the international community to expand such a halo right across the high seas.

Already the project has won strong support from Philippe Cousteau, Jr, grandson of the legendary Jacques-Yves Cousteau, and in September the Alliance will be given the prestigious International SeaKeepers Society annual award.

“It’s an exciting time. If Bermuda can get this done, it’s going to set the tone for the rest of the ocean,” said Chris Flook, who represents the Pew Environmental Group in the Blue Halo project.

“There are so many tragic stories in the oceans. This could be a bit of hope.”

Sailing slowly through on “Moon River,” however, I could only think how odd – and sad – it is that of all the terrible phenomena associated with the Sargasso over the centuries, the garbage patch is the most sinister. And real.

In legend, man has always looked to the watery depths for his worst nightmare: his Kraken, his Jaws, even Nessie. But it seems that the true sea monsters are found right on the surface: in our own reflections.

Swimming with the monsters of the Sargasso Sea

Stay on the boat! That simple command never leaves the sailor’s mind while at sea.

Falling overboard isn’t quite like falling out of a plane without a parachute. You may live. Yet your chances rapidly decrease in offshore conditions, where the boat is moving quickly, the waves are big, and, very likely, the one other crew member capable of rescuing you is fast asleep on their off watch.

Fall overboard and you and Icarus tumbling through the sky have more in common than not.

So there are few stranger – and wildly liberating – sensations than to pause in mid-ocean, hundreds of miles from any harbor and several miles high up over the seabed, and deliberately plunge from your vessel.

We did this a few days after leaving Bermuda, heading into the heart of the Sargasso Sea, where in light winds we drifted and meandered for a week, becoming so lazy, so unambitious, that at some point it became hard to remember we were ultimately meant to cross the Atlantic.

In other words: perfect swimming conditions.

We were over the abyssal plain that covers most of the mid-Atlantic. The chart told us that under “Moon River” the ocean dropped a staggering 2,900 fathoms. That’s 3.2 miles of water, or 5.1 kilometers. Or 11 Empire State Buildings end on end.

Somewhere down there, the most secretive animals on Earth – giant squid, lamp fish, eels and the rest – were playing their freakish roles.

But our own attention was fixed on the surface, where the bows of “Moon River” eased through mazes of golden sargassum weed, every clump teeming with its own panoply of monsters – miniature though they may have been.

Histrio-histrio, or the sargassum anglerfish, is “pound for pound your worst nightmare,” says Chris Flook, longtime collector of species at Bermuda’s aquarium. The glum-faced little creature swims and walks around the weed, using fins that end in frog-like webbing or what some suggest amount to fingers. We watched him dispatch a shrimp that we unkindly placed with him in a bucket. The encounter was so rapid that the shrimp simply vanished.

Histrio-histrio: bad tempered and quick

Brief encounter between histrio-histrio and a shrimp...

There were other surprises here: juvenile reef fish that arrived as larvae on the ocean currents and which, when bigger, will leave the nursery and return to their coral homes.

There was also a crab with a blue underside and white top designed to blend in with the sky when seen from below and to resemble sea bubbles when spotted from above. Many bunches of sargassum also glittered with sticky nets of flying fish eggs…

In legend, the Sargasso Sea trapped whole ships in its weedy embrace and condemned crews to wander this lost world for eternity.

And that’s the exact fate of many of these small marine creatures. They’re in the most curious of predicaments. On their weed rafts, they can safely navigate the high seas, usually the habitat of great athletes like the tuna or dolphin. Yet, being poor swimmers, they can’t afford to step off – death would soon follow.

So it is that these fleets of tangled ships are doomed to drift around the Atlantic, their crews never sighting land and never entering shallow water, much less the rocky foreshore that a crab, for example, would love.

Free, yet imprisoned: they are a lot like us sailors on boats. Well, except we don’t often have to deal with the likes of histrio-histrio.

Now suspended over this world, it was time to jump from our own raft, the tangle of fiberglass, steel, aluminum, bronze and wood we call “Moon River.”

In I went, smashing the ceiling of the ocean. Sunlight tore down with me, descending in vast parallel columns to incredible depths. Holding my breath, I swam further and further under the boat. The water was so clear I had trouble keeping my sense of distance.

When I looked up, I saw the keel and rudder and propeller in perfect detail, as if through a window.

And all around floated sargassum mats, brilliant gold in the light, hanging like chandeliers over my head. They looked bigger now, viewed from underneath.

Despite having concentrated on learning about the miniature residents of the Sargasso, I was aware that
much larger beasts also frequent these waters. After all, the little attract slightly bigger, and so on. Adele and I took turns: one swam; one kept watch for sharks.

Limited by my lungs, I dove and surfaced, dove and surfaced.

As soon as my head was above water after a dive, I'd become aware of things in an ordinary way. The curve between sky and sea reminded me of the complexity of the world, at once familiar and overwhelming. The sight of “Moon River” drifting away underlined that swimming off your boat in mid-ocean always carries risk.

In fact, each time I surfaced I was surprised at the growing distance to the safety of the boarding ladder. I noted the somewhat anxious expressions of Adele, Zephyr and Looli as they looked down from “Moon River’s” railing.

Underwater, though, everything changed. I felt momentarily as if I could swim forever, that I could follow those sunbeams. Of course, I couldn’t, but a couple times I went down far enough to realize that I didn’t have quite enough breath left for an easy ascent.

After the swim, we set sail again. But only a few minutes passed before something really big did rise from the bottom of the sea: whales.

Spout visible top left

So perhaps they’d been watching us through that crystal water all along.

Floating islands, island hopping, and a submerged world

So where does the Sargasso – this sea with no ports, fixed boundaries or coast – take you?

We were one of the last boats to leave the anchorage in Saint George’s, Bermuda, for the summer’s Atlantic crossing season. When the customs people asked for our next port – they’re very keen to keep tabs – we said “Horta in the Azores,” because it was the first place that came to mind. It’s also where most people do stop at after their crossing.

What we really did on weaving free from Bermuda’s protective coral ring was to head south-east: into the Sargasso.

Our destination: a place with no destination.

By reaching Bermuda from New York, we had technically already entered the Sargasso, but we wanted to go deeper. So we sailed south-east, leaving behind the well-traveled path from Bermuda up to 40 degrees North, the latitude where sailing boats usually go to find steady winds blowing to the Azores.

So began the strangest and most dreamy – and occasionally nightmarish – of cruises. We spent a full week drifting around the Sargasso, seeing only a couple cargo ships and no sailing or fishing boats. Usually, sailing involves stopping in ports or anchoring off beaches. This time the only pauses we made were at windrows of floating sargassum, teeming with tiny, ferocious inhabitants.

We collected sargassum in nets, shaking the golden fronds to check for their camouflaged residents. We played reality experiments in which we placed sargassum creatures in a bucket, then waited to see who ate whom. They often surprised us.

For example, most of the large sargassum shrimps, looking very much like scaled-down lobsters, were dead in a day. But much tinier versions were so good at finding cover in the sargassum branches that they survived. Brains, not brawn won.

Big claws (top right), but little chance

This one lived by its wits

The Sargasso used to be known as the “sea of lost ships,” a part of the Atlantic dreaded and avoided by mariners for its maddening squalls, contrary currents and calms. The Spaniards knew it as the Horse Latitudes, the place where their ships drifted uselessly, water supplies dwindled and the livestock had to be thrown into the brilliantly clear water.

We also wallowed in the swell, sails smacking against the rigging, the cabin’s contents lurching about, and the sea so astonishingly transparent that we might as well have been suspended in the sky.

In daytime, sea and sky mirrored each other in deep blue. But late afternoon and at night, vast squalls marched over, illuminated in the Moon, and spinning wild winds through every quarter of the compass.

As far as our navigational strategy, the idea, after making  that dog leg south-east in the direction of west Africa, was to start tending east, vaguely  in the direction of Europe, if not exactly the Azores.

However, anyone examining our zig-zag course (a curved zig-zag at that) would have been baffled. During our third night at sea, I realized in dismay that our next long tack would take us right back within sight of the Bermuda lighthouse. Wondering at the effect this would have on morale, I discreetly dropped the plan to tack, and kept going the way we were, even if this meant utterly the wrong direction. We could at least enjoy the illusion of making progress.

Then after a week, we finally turned our backs on the Sargasso and sailed up to the 40^th parallel to grab  those westerly winds.

By now we’d become so used to islands – whether Bermuda’s coral, the Sargasso’s floating archipelago, or the miniature platform of “Moon River” herself – that Flores, an out-of-the-way, wave-washed speck in the Azores, felt just right as first landfall on the other side.

We dropped anchor in a deserted bay where a waterfall crashed down from the cliff and a stream of cold fresh water ran right across the rocky beach into the sea.

Wading up that stream, slipping in deep pools, and hopping across boulders, we reached a second thunderous waterfall, a waterfall so photogenic that you almost expected someone to pop out from the bushes to film a shampoo commercial.

Perched half way between sea and land, we cooked on a driftwood fire. At night, we listened to “Moon River’s” anchor chain growl and scrape loudly on the rocks below.

Many look at the sea and notice only the flatness, as if it were some kind of prairie or desert, yet the mystery and power of the ocean lies nearly entirely underneath -- the great exception being the Sargasso Sea and its continent-sized expanse of floating weed forests.

Underwater, however, nothing is ever the same.

The gusting, circular winds in the cliff-lined bay had sent "Moon River" turning so often that her anchor chain became wrapped around a series of underwater boulders. They were huge rocks, the size of cars, and unless I extricated the chain, "Moon River" would be trapped.

Diving down, I thought of the swims I’d made while in the Sargasso. There, I held my breath down to similar depths (about 30 feet). The difference was that here, wrestling with the anchor and the rocks, I couldn’t go a foot further. Yet back in the Sargasso, a place separated from here only by water, the abyss dropped another 17,000 feet or more -- considerably deeper even than the diving range of the greatest whale.

You could say that the sea and the seabed are a parallel world in which the water is equivalent to our sky and the underwater landscape is as dramatic and varied as our own. For example, what we call the Azores islands are really just the volcanic peaks of the tallest underwater mountains in this part of the mid-Atlantic Ridge. And roaming these valleys -- instead of elephants, lions and other great land beasts -- are whales, tuna, sharks, as well as fish every bit as colorful and whimsical as songbirds.

Leaving Flores we sailed overnight to the next island, Faial, and into the great Atlantic yachting crossroads of Horta. The western cliffs of the island rose suddenly at dawn from dense cloud. The Azores are famous for appearing and disappearing suddenly and even in good weather a single cloud can quickly swallow any one of these islands.

It's a phenomenon that recalls the work of Ignatius Donnelly, that genius/quack of an American politician who back in the 1880s came up with the bestseller Atlantis – the antediluvian world. With Atlantis Donnelly singlehandedly transformed an old Platonic tale into a made-for-Hollywood mystery and, with great verve, argued that the location for this lost civilization must be the Azores.

Laugh we might today. Countless submarine expeditions have failed to turn up a single broken column around these volcanic peaks (even if researchers did name one of the many submerged mountains nearby “Atlantis.”)

But of course Donnelly was writing before such underwater research was possible. At the time, his reams of scholarly evidence (most of it brilliantly exploited circumstantial evidence) sounded persuasive. Certainly the Azores have the right look as the setting for such a disaster.

What I do know for sure now is this: the world is above all a watery place and we are only guests.

Landfall!

Mid-Atlantic. Zephyr and Looli under the Atlantic Ocean

OK, you're thinking that "Moon River" vanished in the Sargasso Sea. Or that I simply couldn't be bothered with blogging anymore. Or, perhaps, that I took to the rum.

None of this is true. Not quite.

We have crossed the Atlantic. We are in the Azores, soon leaving for Madeira. Even sooner -- within a day or two --there will be a series of posts.

So please stay tuned. Have faith. And pass the rum.

Mid-Atlantic, above water. All we have to do is hold on. "Moon River" takes care of it all.

And in the meantime, you can find out the French version (better food and better looking people) if you visit Adele's scribblings on: http://nautisme.lefigaro.fr/blogs/adele-smith-6.php

There'll also soon be some of my own stuff on the Agence France-Presse website: http://blogs.afp.com/correspondent/ and on http://www.sargassoalliance.org/, the website for the Sargasso Sea Alliance -- folks trying to save the "rainforest of the ocean."

Saying goodbye

Sailors are always leaving. Even when they arrive, they’re half gone again. But it’s hard to depart from New York after five years: so many goodbyes, so many memories among those skyscrapers and rivers. A few regrets.

Our friend Emmanuel Dunand, an AFP photographer, caught us heading on the strong tide down the East River, toward the open sea. We look carefree, but there were tears an hour later as we passed under the Verrazano Bridge and out of New York Harbor. We had about 700 miles to go before reaching next land.

 

Leaving Manhattan -- photo by Emmanuel Dunand

Only an hour later racing under full sail into the Atlantic, “Moon River” struck something underwater with a shuddering bang. I looked back over the railing and behind us was a huge, semi-submerged log, perhaps part of a dock washed out during Hurricane Sandy and floating around ever since. It seemed almost as if land was trying to claw us back.

New York’s towers poked over the horizon all day, but by evening just a glow remained in the sky, and then only stars, thick and big and snowflakes. Keeping the first watch, I listened to National Public Radio's WNYC, that staple of my old New York life, a final time. I couldn't believe I was still able to pick up the station. Frank Sinatra was singing about the moon.

Then the FM signal on my little portable radio became so weak that if I tilted the antenna an inch the wrong way, I tripped into another station playing the heaviest of heavy metal. Then just white noise. We were alone in the Atlantic.

Goodbye Manhattan

To get from New York to the Sargasso Sea, you have to cross the Gulf Stream. Zephyr and Looli asked if we could go around. We couldn't. Nature had taken charge. We were no longer Manhattanites now. So we went through two days of squalls, waves smashing into the cabin, and the intended course that had been penciled so neatly across the chart going haywire. Call it price of entry to a wonderworld. 

Zephyr and Looli got through this lying in their bunks, clutching tiny buckets. Adele, sleepless even before we’d left New York, entered an advanced version of that zombie state common to first days on the high sea, every movement reduced to the minimum, just clinging on. I spent my hours outside with the compass and binoculars, water pouring off my ugly but impenetrable French fisherman’s gear, a kitchen timer next to my head to wake me every 15 minutes for a check of the horizon.

Then quite suddenly, the black-blue Atlantic turned Mediterranean blue. We penetrated the western edge of the Sargasso Sea. At last, the waves became regular and we started to see the windrows of sargassum weed that float across thousands of miles of the ocean, the so-called rainforest of the sea.

A small shark, or what we decided had the grey-torpedo look of a shark, followed us for hours. Dolphins leapt, at one point in such numbers that we had to stop counting – the sea boiling with their pearly dorsal fins. When I went down into the cabin, I could clearly hear their clicking and whistling through the hull.

Looli sings to the dolphins after the Gulf Stream crossing

A few miles short of Bermuda, the wind died entirely -- a classic Sargasso moment. These were the Horse Latitudes where becalmed Spanish mariners had to jettison their warhorses into the sea. But we didn’t care. The sea had opened its doors and, without even realizing, we’d made ourselves at home. We drifted, listened to music, and marveled at the change in our expectations.

Now the harbor in Saint George, Bermuda, is full of sailing boats preparing to cross the Atlantic. Most head north in search of steady west winds that blow to the Azores. Soon we'll also go looking for that oceanic highway, but first we're going to leave everything, everyone behind, and head southeast deeper into the Sargasso, searching for clues to its secrets – and troubles.