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.