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.