Into infinity

When we left New York last June, my goal was to explore the mysterious Sargasso Sea – the restless, yet strangely quiet heart of the Atlantic Ocean. And together with Adele, Zephyr and Looli I began in direct fashion, sailing to Bermuda, then far into this fabled zone of calms, floating weed, monstrous sea creatures and lost sailors.

But what on Earth have I been doing in Africa, you may ask. Well… And the Caribbean? I can explain… And what are those new charts for the coasts of Venezuela, Colombia, Panama and Mexico? Did I get lost in the Sargasso? Or did I lose the Sargasso myself?

Perhaps a little of both.

Or look at it this way.

There is no absolute agreement about where the Sargasso really is – and that’s part of the mystique. There are estimates and studies and there’s the general idea that the Sargasso is in mid-Atlantic, where you find floating sargassum weed.

Then again, you  may encounter rafts of sargassum in all sorts of places, patches taking their rootless freedom to extremes, nowhere near the center of the ocean. For example, we came across this bunch just a couple days off the coast of Gambia.

The green mat  in middle is an errant sargassum raft.... alongside an errant sailing boat

But you can also argue that the North Atlantic gyre, that phenomenon of winds and currents spinning clockwise about the ocean, amounts to a perfectly good border for the Sargasso. An invisible, landless border, yes; protean, always moving; yet undeniable.

The gyre could be said to start at the Gulf Stream, that submerged river roaring north past the United States. Then it bends right, sweeping past Europe, Africa, and back across to the Caribbean, then up into the Gulf Stream once more.

In one sense, this is a true barrier, because the Sargasso lies inside and cannot escape. Yet the gyre is also the motor creating the Sargasso in the first place, the whirligig with the still eye at its center.

So the scientists and savants can say what they like. I'm deciding I know where the Sargasso is. And that’s what we’ve been doing on our voyage: riding the Sargasso whirligig.

This December we found ourselves on the most fabled leg of the circle: the Trade Wind route between Africa and the Americas. Leaving Gambia and setting the bow of “Moon River” for Antigua, about 2,600 nautical miles (or 4,800 kilometers) to the west, we entered a part of the world unknown to mankind before Columbus.

Of course, the great Admiral found the Americas by accident. However, another discovery was his alone: that ships descending to a latitude of about 20 degrees north in winter will get hard, steady wind blowing in a gentle curve across the entire ocean. It’s a route as reliable and relentless as the turning of the planet, a watery autobahn that remade history.

In the early days of sail, even the clumsiest ship was assured a fast passage to the New World. Crews on today’s sailing boats, which are far more maneuverable, can set aside a lot of their fancy gear, rigging the sails much like those of the past. They need simply to point in the right direction.

There are occasional lulls. And we got a two-day gale near Cape Verde. But the overall sensation was of having only to grab the sky’s coattails and hang on, right up until the rocky entrance in English Harbour, Antigua , exactly 18 days later.

Roaring west, we slid down mesmerizing wave after mesmerizing wave, covering 140 nautical miles or so every day.

These are the latitudes of one-way trips and on leaving Gambia we were uncomfortably aware of seeing the same low African coast that bid farewell to those crowded slave ships streaming across to the Americas. Would the slave trade ever have grown to such grotesque proportions without that unstoppable conveyor belt of easterly winds? It seems unlikely.

Really, anything at all will complete the journey, given time. In 1982 solo sailor Steven Callahan sank near the Canaries and, unable to return upwind to relatively nearby land, kept going in his liferaft. For 76 days wind and current carried him drifting across the Atlantic -- to safety -- and all he had to do was stay alive. Which, amazingly, he did.

Along the way, his liferaft attracted first small creatures, then slightly bigger, and finally large, life-sustaining fish like dorados that Callahan speared, becoming king of a floating island that resembled nothing so much as one of those itinerant patches of sargassum.

“Moon River” seemed tiny in the great wilderness and we felt powerless before the forces of nature. Conversely we had harnessed that same power, becoming part of the great system - bit players in the theater of eternity. Not that people belong in the Atlantic gyre any more than they belong in space or deserts, but on a sailing ship, grasping the wind, we can pretend we do.

At Christmas, a thousand miles from land, we piled presents under a Gambian mangrove branch tied to the mast. We sang carols in the cockpit, the words blowing immediately away into the night. We marked the New Year under the stars, but the midnight countdown couldn’t have been more meaningless. Precise seconds count for nothing on a voyage like this – except when the navigator angles his sextant to capture the sun.

Anchoring in Antigua, we were overjoyed to see trees and people and tropical birds. Yet a piece of me remained out there in the eternal ocean and always will.

In those weeks, we were four shipmates bouncing around a cabin the size of some people’s walk-in closets. Yet the domed roof of the universe and the ocean miles deep under our keel were the true boundaries.

We were giants. And savage surroundings gave us peace.

Even in mid-ocean, the boat's turbulence will sometimes awake nighttime bioluminescence, these fireflies of the sea that defy the dark essence of their world. Each day, it seemed to me that Adele, Zephyr and Looli matched that miracle, lighting the ocean with courage – courage which we didn’t call courage, but laughter and love. HOLD FAST, sailors' tattooed knuckles used to read. Well, Adele, Zephyr and Looli - they held fast.

Opening presents on Christmas morning, 1,000 nautical miles and about a week from landfall

Even now the Trade Winds and currents roar outside the harbor in Antigua where “Moon River” is 

safely anchored. Finally, the gyre will bend around in the Caribbean to sweep north into the Gulf Stream, the Sargasso’s western border, and so start all over again.

We too.

From here we’ll head south, west and west again into the ferocious wind funnels of the Colombian coast, then north into US waters and the Gulf Stream once more.

We are nothing. Yet the sea is infinity – and in following the gyre we caught a glimpse.

Among the pirogues of Africa

Adele, Zephyr and Looli return from a Senegalese village

First came floating islands of sargassum weed. Next the rocky islands of the Atlantic. But finally in Senegal, then Gambia, the crew of “Moon River” stepped out onto a continent for the first time since we left New York last June.

By sailing to Africa from Cape Verde – with Halloween at sea – we added a strange protrusion from the otherwise circular path of our Sargasso circumnavigation.

Yet, continent or not, it seemed throughout our time in Africa that we were still barely more on land than afloat.

This wasn’t a trip to that Africa of savanna or mountains. There were no elephants or lions. This was a sojourn in the watery version of Africa, an Africa so impermanent, so vague, that land and water mix, literally, in a muddy expanse starting miles out to sea and narrowing into rivers that snake far beyond the coasts.

Few foreign sailors get to Senegal and The Gambia, and on arriving in a sailing yacht you can find yourself greeted as if you’d landed in a UFO. To most locals your boat not only represents unimaginable technical sophistication and wealth, but something even more incomprehensible: freedom.

"Moon River" in the Casamance River

African sailors of all stripes found “Moon River” a mystery, a sort of fragile toy, a luxurious caprice, and at the same time a machine for the kind of sea voyages they could not -- would not -- begin to contemplate. They were always amazed to hear we’d sailed from America, that we sometimes spent weeks on the open sea, and were preparing to sail on from Africa back across the Atlantic. At times they didn’t believe us.

In these waters, the only boat really at home is the pirogue. These come in different sizes but almost always the same banana shape. Some are the hollowed trunks of trees; others are constructed with planks. Some are left their natural wood color; others (most) are brightly painted and emblazoned with names like “Sante Yalla,” “Still Fire,” “Gamme Yalla,” “Koufa Yakour.” I saw one whose name was “In Jesus Name.”

Pirogues have paddles, not oars, which were considered a major technological advance in ancient times, but are not used in West Africa. Some have outboard engines.

And they all leak. In every pirogue someone is bailing water.

Pirogue fishermen occupy just about the poorest economic rung and one whom we met in Senegal’s Casamance River was so poor that even his bucket had holes. We gave him one of ours. We also gave him a little material to caulk the worst of his leaks.

pirogue anchors

But the pirogue fishermen we saw everywhere – from the industrial harbor in Dakar to the furthest corner in the Casamance –didn’t let things like leaks get in their way.

Small pirogues with one or two men aboard sailed through creeks and rivers that don’t even appear on charts (not that they have charts.)

Senegalese fishermen Sherif and Zal

they caught a barracuda in a net

Big pirogues carrying crews of a dozen men and boys go 10 or 15 miles out into the Atlantic, where the seabed is still only a few meters down through murky water, and fish remain plentiful. At dawn, they return to their river harbors, roaring in, the crews in rags, but often strikingly proud looking, nonchalant, supremely comfortable aboard. They might as well have be coming directly from the set of a pirate film.

Hand building new pirogues in Dakar

Margins are thin and the risks enormous.

Once we gave a tow to two fishermen who had set themselves the task of paddling 14 miles upriver to market on a savagely hot afternoon. They had big fish in an icebox, but the ice was almost gone. I suppose if we hadn’t shown up, they simply would have kept paddling, and arrived with worthless fish.

Accident – good or bad – is the constant companion on these edges of the maritime world.

Some would call that fate, but the pirogue men do little to challenge their fate. They go with the flow, so to speak. They do things the way they’ve always been done. They keep bailing water. And paddling.

At night, sailing off the coast of Gambia, we found ourselves caught in a galaxy of pirogues, literally becoming trapped in the fleet and unable to turn one way or another without risking a new collision.

The pirogues hadn’t been out there as we sailed through dusk. So I don’t know how they all materialized miles offshore in the dark. But they did and then they were invisible, except for crazy assortments of lights waved in an effort to warn us away.

Normally, boats at night show internationally recognized combinations of colored lights. With these, you can signal your direction, your size, even the nature of your business. These codes are crucial to enabling boats to avoid each other.

But among the pirogues, the chaotic mixture of bicycle lights, torches, and sometimes even charcoal braziers, filled the ocean with incoherent flashes, beams, and flickers, forcing us to steer “Moon River” in zigzags, always trying to escape into clearer waters, but usually straying into yet another group of pirogues.

At best, a collision meant us becoming entangled in a net, ruining their fishing and perhaps crippling our steering gear. A direct hit could easily sink a pirogue and probably “Moon River,” and possibly kill a fisherman.

What could we do? What could they do?

big pirogue returns to Dakar at dawn

Those groups of pirogues kept popping up in the shallow seas right until dawn. Sometimes, one would motor right across our bow, showing no lights at all, and only the noise of the motor and phantom-like silhouettes of men in dug-out tree trunks betraying its presence.

Then incredibly, mysteriously, when the sun finally rose we found ourselves alone again. There was not a pirogue in sight.

We arrived in Banjul, the capital of The Gambia, as the sun rose red in a sky filled with Saharan sand. Now we were on the continent. Yet for me, we’d already been in deepest Africa.

We’d been there all night.

Going in circles

So I’m back. Or I never left, but my blog is back.

There’s some catching up to do. We’ve sailed “Moon River” to the Canaries, the Cape Verdes, Dakar, the Casamance River, The Gambia, and then across the Atlantic (again) to the Caribbean. And we’re about to follow the old pirate routes through the West Indies to Venezuela, Columbia, Panama and up past Mexico to Florida.

So where do I start?

And how?

But I will.

I haven’t forgotten – I just haven’t had the time, the full laptop battery, the Internet connection, or the soul power. Or not all at once.

I’m fixing that now though.

Watch this space.