FOUND

It’s a funny thing, but the places where we’ve been most lost – technically lost – have also been where we’ve felt most at home.

This is what I mean by technically lost.

Entrance to River Casamance, Senegal

Nautical charts look incredibly accurate and in places like Europe and the United States they are. Surprisingly large areas of the world, however, are covered by charts surveyed at best 50 years ago, sometimes much further back, and no one has bothered to update or check them since – there just isn’t the money in it.

That picture is a shot of an electronic chart we used to enter the River Casamance, a major waterway in Senegal, West Africa. Electronic charts may look even more convincing than the old fashioned paper ones, but they’re based on the same information gathered decades or even a century ago by chaps with sextants and lead and lines.

On this screen grab, the brown bits are supposed to be land and blue the water. But check the red line dipping down – that's an actual route taken by a boat, recorded on the GPS, and passed on to us to help us enter. That's the route you, we, have to follow.  In other words, you have to cross what is meant to be land in order not to hit land (and as we found out there’s an awful lot of land in the entrance to the River Casamance, much of it in shipwreck mode two or three feet under muddy water.)

Keep following that red line down and you'll notice it enters an area neither blue nor brown, but grey -- grey as in not charted, although in reality a wonderful stretch of African river lined by palm trees and small thatched-roof settlements.

Of course, we also had a paper chart for the Casamance, a splendid British Admiralty production. But this turned out to contain chunks of fiction, the kind of stuff that might have been collated by a malaria-wracked explorer.

Actually, here you can just see a square overlay where an Admiralty chart agent has devotedly tried to update the previously false chart by gluing a corrected snippet in place. Inevitably, even the correction was totally wrong in certain spots.

It’s a similar story for Los Roques, the fragile and bewitching islands where we have just come from on our way between Venezuela and Colombia.

This is a chart based on a survey by the U.S.S. Hannibal in 1939 and 1940 and that big blank white area in the middle is, well, a big blank area. It’s hard to read in the picture (the chart got a lot of use in the sun and salt), but what the chart says, honestly enough, is: “Unsurveyed – numerous coral heads and submerged reefs.”

That white patch covers the majority of the Roques archipelago. Tabula rasa. I love it!

Obviously, you just avoid those mysterious white areas when you have a keel boat. But even to thread through the reefs surrounding the relatively well-surveyed island of Tres Palmeras, where we swam with turtles and dove for conch, we had to follow distinctly old world instructions: line up the island’s palm trees with your compass at 60 degrees and hold this course until reaching deep water.

There are only two palm trees on the island, despite the name Tres Palmeras. What happened to the third member of this spindly trinity is not clear. To confuse matters more, the nautical chart asserts with almost comical assurance: “lone palm.”

For now, the handiwork of those American naval surveyors remains the main source of information for Los Roques. When I asked a local skipper about the accuracy of my chart, which like all charts of a certain vintage gives depths in fathoms rather than meters or feet, he laughed.

“We call them phantoms, not fathoms. Rely on what you see, not what’s written here." Often the best advice.

Of course nothing beats the Sargasso Sea for sheer off-the-mapness. “This area of weed has given rise to many stories of ships trapped in it and unable to make their way out, a belief prevalent among many seamen of older days but finally disproved,” notes the “Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea.”

Here is a sea with no land around it. The border – and there is one – is invisible, a question of water salinity and temperature, as well as the ever shifting presence of those floating weed patches. No one owns the Sargasso, no one fully understands its secrets, and ultimately no one can stay there for very long. It’s a destination with no destination.

But what these three places have in common, other than wavering coordinates, is they have all so far escaped mankind’s worst depredations and in all of them we found unexpected grace –glimpses, perhaps, of the world as it was meant to be.

In Los Roques, where pre-Colombian shamans once came for secret ceremonies of fire, tobacco, conch, and worship, we were like time travelers.

Above water we were surrounded by inhabited islands. The sky filled with frigate birds and boobies. Below water, a wonderworld awaited. Adele, Zephyr and Looli were Alices, totally foreign, yet invited in. OK, so I was an Alice too, a cross-dressing subaqua Alice paddling from coral chess game to parrot fish tea party.

We continued our lazy, lonely voyage in nearby islands called Los Aves which also belong to Venezuela and are even wilder. For days we saw no one. Sometimes the silence, or rather the lack of human noise, was so intense that we ourselves were hushed. When we swam we felt half-fish and when we slept we dreamed of underwater gardens. The day we sailed away I felt the wrench in my heart of having to leave one I loved.

These are the places where I want to be. These are the places we spend most energy reaching. But they’re also the places, in one way or another, where we know even before arriving that we will soon have to leave. Sargasso, Africa, Aves – these are unmapped, floating figments, will o’wisps. They’re for us and not for us. Always drifting off the map. Arriving, leaving. Lost and found.