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.