OLD FRIENDS

I have a new job and it’s in Paris, so I’m taking the family and heading off to work – by boat.

Our third Atlantic crossing in 12 months proves again that at sea nothing is ever the same and nothing new. Philosophers tell us that such is the way of the world – in history, love, war, ambition.  At least I can say this is true of the sea.

Choosing the fast northern route from New York to Ireland, we dip south initially to 41 degrees north latitude, making sure to avoid icebergs coming off the Grand Banks. And so for a few days we find ourselves navigating the outer fringes of the Sargasso Sea that lured me into this voyage exactly a year ago.

We may not be in the Sargasso proper, but the route takes us back in the influence of the Gulf Stream and therefore the Sargasso neighborhood. There’s a sense of homecoming. Again the water turns diamond-clear blue. Again, the surface is mottled with golden patches of sargassum weed, those floating islands that drift over the mid-Atlantic abyssal plains. We shake out weed caught in a net, rousting its perfectly camouflaged inhabitants, and a monstrous gang they are, identical to the vicious little shrimps, crabs and other beasties we’ve found camped on weed islands all across the central Atlantic. What uniformity in nature, yet also what powers of invention!

Why do these creatures exist, what is their purpose, these miniature sailors, these crews on rootless weed fronds hitched to the currents of the North Atlantic Gyre? Just pitch the idea to yourself: a golden crab lords it over a branch of floating seaweed a thousand miles from any shore, his cozy little weed house lost on an ocean of terrifying vastness. The story’s crazy. What is that crab: master or prisoner, traveler or castaway? What a journey. How pointless; how glorious!

With the iceberg zone cleared, we bend northeast, the water getting colder, dark green now. The last ragged bunches of sargassum have a dull, sickly color and ride low in the water. In the Sargasso Sea, the fronds reproduce perpetually. The healthy branches break off, starting new islands and leaving old branches to decay and sink. But there’s no chance of renewal for any weed islands that drifted as far up as we are now. These are the lost ones, doomed to sink miles down into the ocean night.

SEA OF LIFE

The north Atlantic is moody. On some days in heavy wind, waves swamp the gunwales, running down past the cabin, gushing through the scuppers. Once, a wave rises over the cockpit, our little haven in the maelstrom, and, instead of slipping by like a thousand others, breaks and pours right in. At other times, there’s no more wetness on deck than the dew of a dead calm.

Of our three Atlantic crossings, this is the most crowded in sealife. Pilot whales, matt black, their noses as blunt as wooden clogs, come whooshing past, 50, 60, at a time. They don’t have the gleeful aspect of the dolphins, but their bulk and effortless speed, all wrapped up in wetsuit-like skin, is a thing of awe. Then a large shark fin slices our wake, the fish’s movements filled with athletic insolence. Inevitably, I think: Imagine if you fell in now.

Man overboard, or MOB, is the base fear of all sailors, the one they don’t discuss much, because there’s no sense, and yet which haunts them all. After all, sailing is a strange occupation, both safe and dangerous simultaneously, rather like sitting down for dinner at the edge of a cliff.

The man in the water can, obviously, expect to drown. Yet I’m reminded in that fin that a sailor could also be eaten – possibly alive. The idea sounds outlandish, like a story from long ago times when humans actually paid for wandering into places where they shouldn't go.

I feel wild gladness as I look over “Moon River’s” low railings. Over the course of more than 10,000 miles in the last year we’ve seen so many signs of devastation inflicted by the fishing industry: the abandoned plastic nets floating forever at sea; the huge trawlers coming from as far as Asia to scour West Africa’s shallows; the scarcity of really big fish on Caribbean coral reefs; the thousands upon thousands of dried shark carcasses that we saw being stacked up in Senegal…

I’m glad to see the beast down there, where it belongs, doing what it does, probably not even aware of the world’s war against the world.

THE ART OF KNOWING NOTHING AND EVERYTHING

On passage, Adele and I each get four hours of unbroken sleep each night. Days are divided between short naps, reading, tending to the boat, cooking, doing repairs, teaching Zephyr and Looli school.

Life is slow, yet there’s no urge to speed up. The hours pass lightly in a kind of animal existence where I may do nothing in particular, yet remain permanently alert. Even in my sleep I’m aware. I watch and listen, taking in the horizon and tiny details of the boat’s equipment almost at the same time. Often I wake in my bunk because of a slight change in movement or a new noise. Everything means something in the wild: nothing is superfluous.

It seems that ashore we cram information, always convinced we need more. Saturated, we’re often barely aware of what’s truly new and what’s regurgitated, what’s important, what’s a lie, what’s beautiful and what’s simply there to dazzle. At sea we have little information. We have no access to news, unless through an email from a friend. We have no satellite phone, no Internet, and most days pass without sighting a distant ship, let alone a human being. The Single Side Band radio, which can receive simple emails and weather forecasts, picks up the BBC World Service in a way so patchy that we quickly give up bothering. Even attempts to listen for results of the World Cup in Brazil are abandoned. After all, what does it matter?

Given so much time and space, I find my thoughts sorting themselves out in a way that would be impossible on land. Fresh ideas float and the unneeded worries sink like rotting sargassum.

Mostly my thoughts are on the friends we saw in New York before this passage and the friends we’ll see in Europe when we start our new life.

New York! My home of five years before his voyage was crazier than I ever remembered. We haven’t had a phone or television for a year so during our two week stay I wandered dazed through the crowds of smartphone addicts staring at their screens in every doorway, sidewalk, café, bus, and park. That posture people have as they walk and browse on the screen gives the impression that they literally are following their devices through the streets, which, in the case of Google maps, they really might be. I thought a visiting Martian might have examined the scene in concern: had a rival, rectangular-shaped space creature beat already invaded the Big Apple and hypnotized the humanoids into submission?

The Big Apple disappointed me at first. It seemed smaller than I remembered; the great skyscraper canyons looked nothing like as dramatic as the ocean swells I’d just seen; the buzz of adventure I always felt walking the streets of Manhattan paled next to the experience of a simple night watch, “Moon River” raging down waves that seemed to touch the stars.

But the city was patient with me and after a week or so I began to rediscover what New York really means: not the canyons and lights and noise, but the people you find crammed together in that sparkling ship of eight million souls. What kindness and generosity old shoremates showed us. We’ve lived so much in self-sufficiency at sea that we’ve forgotten what it means to be part of a great community. New Yorker friends treated us like a bedraggled and unshaven royalty when in fact they were the nobler ones. If they read this, they’ll know whom I mean. We will always remember them as a part of this voyage.

Zephyr and Looli, turning 11 and nine, hit the city very much like the child versions of the sailor on shore leave: not a pizza joint left standing. Adele the acrobat, who flits seamlessly between splendid loneliness at sea and the social whirligig of the city, dived back into action, with an agenda that would not have disgraced a visiting prime minister.

“Moon River” needed a repairs and preparation ahead of the next test, so I spent days in the boatyard at City Island where I had originally outfitted ahead of our voyage. Here in the grittier – refreshingly smartphone free – surrounds of the Bronx I reconnected with Andy, Karl and my old boatyard friends, or not boatyard friends, but just the very best kind of friends. People who have helped me so much in putting together “Moon River” that I feel their presence in the boat.

INTO THE BLUE

By now, the sea called, and the hurricane season rumbled, so I dragged my shipmates from the parties and back aboard. In Buzzard’s Bay, near Nantucket, we sat with fellow sailors and friends watching Hurricane Arthur blow by and for a final time enjoying the simple warmth of friendship. As sea people, Jeff, Mege, Orly and Asa understood where we were going and why. The moment Arthur passed, we said farewell to the United States, left all behind, and plunged into the watery frontier.

Land people think the ocean empty, a featureless wasteland, and yet we passed landmark upon landmark, even if mostly hidden: the foggy offshore sandbanks, the plunging continental shelf, the route of the freezing Labrador current, the Suhm Abyssal Plain, and just south of the Tail of the Bank the resting place of the “Titanic.” Longitude now, not time, measured our progress toward old Europe, and each meridian ticked off was a small triumph.

Even in boats we are only dimly aware of the world we are visiting at sea. Dolphins frequently rush up to “Moon River,” escorting us down waves like posses of California surfers. They seem friendly yet we have no idea why they come – or how they decide so suddenly to leave, or where they go. One day we see the high spouts of a large whale, too far away to identify, but one of the leviathans, these most mysterious and gentle giants of the deep that have been slaughtered to the brink of extinction. At night along much of our route the phosphorescence is so rich that “Moon River” travels in a green cloud, with a thick, sparkling tail of bioluminescence streaming astern. Swift emerald trails underwater reveal otherwise invisible dolphins. Even flushing the sea toilet sucks in phosphorescent water, the humble porcelain bowl appearing to swirl with diamonds.

Indecipherable borders mark the skies. In one patch of ocean the elegant Cory’s shearwater rules, those long, severe wings slicing in and out of the waves with barely a beat. In another, it’s the podgy, no-nonsense fulmar, or the delicate tern. Storm petrels are said to herald rough weather and indeed we have them crowding “Moon River” at night, swooping and darting, bat-like, just as strong winds set in. We don’t see the petrels in calms. Where do they go?

AN ISLAND OF OUR OWN

How many times I’ve flown across this same stretch of Atlantic between Europe and the US, looking down from tiny airliner windows at what resembles a black, frozen surface, and wondering how it would be down there. The sight is so savage, so lonely from a plane. Now that I’m here, though, the picture is quite different. Wilderness surrounds us but in the middle is “Moon River,” a 40 foot cocoon of life and love. The open ocean can feel unexpectedly intimate – a private backyard of endless horizons.

Compared to the ocean dwellers we are primitive pretenders, yet on human terms “Moon River” is a masterful boat, an example of the best American naval architecture, and we ourselves are no longer such clumsy mariners. Riding under scraps of sailcloth, we bend the heavens and seas to our will, or at least try, always steering east.

Distances mean little to us nowadays. In terms of our reserves of stamina and patience, 1,000 miles today has the feel of the old 100 miles. Indeed, were it not for the challenge of carrying enough food and water, we could sail on almost indefinitely.

At the start of our voyage, seasickness was a frequent companion for my three shipmates, but no more.  “Moon River’s” old puke buckets, those warhorses of many mal de mer sessions, sit idle, probably boring younger, untested buckets in the locker with tales of when it was tough.

Zephyr and Looli spend their ocean days in games that involve ever growing numbers of dolls, stuffed animals, miniature dolls, homemade clothes and props, expanding into every corner of “Moon River’s” cabin. The games are so complex that planning them and negotiating the roles of each character takes half a day in itself.

With that childish talent for mixing genres and moments, they move blithely from fantasies to schoolwork to chess marathons to arguing and crying to making up and laughing to rushing on deck to watch dolphins to nestling behind lee cloths with Kindles to listening, keen-eyed, as I read aloud from Sherlock Holmes, to falling asleep again as night falls, oblivious to waves pounding against the hull barely an inch thick.

Then there’s Adele, magical Adele, as one of our friends who came aboard for a visit in Madeira once called her.

 A year ago, Adele embarked from an almost sleepless existence in New York and was knocked flat by the exertions of the sea. Now – and never more than on this 2,800 mile 

crossing, she has become a true salt, as happy on the water as a bird in a tree. Living at sea can require physical strength – brute force comes in handy sometimes – but the demands are mostly on the spirit. And the daintiest seashell can be extremely tough.

Celebrating our 14^th wedding anniversary over an Atlantic area with the ominous name Faraday Fracture Zone, I thought then, as I suspect I always will, how strange and brilliant the currents were that brought me and Adele together on a quite different sea of life over a decade ago – currents as strange and unpredictable and yet as strong, and in the end logical, as the intricate patterns that bind the oceans together.

Me, I suppose I’m become the old seadog I always had in me. The tip of my seatime beard has turned white, a gale force white. To Adele’s chagrin, my pre-existing barbaric tendencies, like eating directly from a cooking pot, have been dangerously reinforced. 

But it’s a fact: I’m happy at sea. I do well here. I like the directness, the authenticity. I like the poetry. And I like the fact that you have to be on your guard. The sea makes you dream, but with a hard edge to keep you honest. Bullshit, that great, numbing presence overshadowing existence ashore, doesn’t float.

CLIMBING ASHORE

After 21 days we make landfall. The cliffs of southwest Ireland rise imperiously from the horizon. I do a double take. For an instant I’m not sure what I’m looking at. Not a ship, not a whale, not a wave. Land. Land Ho! We all holler and whoop. Already I can smell the cut hay on the hills. The storied lighthouse on Fastnet Rock falls away to starboard. I furl the sails, fire up the engine, and edge gingerly past several small islands into the darkened harbor of Schull. Dropping anchor, we can hear drunken laughter from pubs in the village. We catch a deep whiff of cow dung. Ireland.

Our voyage is rapidly ending. Here in Schull, we will have a pint with one of our oldest and best of friends, then sail to England to catch up with more old shipmates, and finally to France. There “Moon River” will go up on land for a rest and I will put on shoes and return to work.

I know that days will come when all we have seen together as a family, as sailors, may seem worthless. The survival instinct developed over thousands of miles in the wild won’t be of much use behind a desk in Paris. What good the mastering of a sextant in this world of apps and instant results?  And when everyone and everything is rushing and jabbering, what good the ability to sit in silence, reading the sky and sea? Unwelcome questions will impose themselves.

Zephyr and Looli will soon rush back into their planet of urban childhood. Before long their carefree days of sleeping in bunks and playing on deck will feel passé, maybe even uncool. Adele and I will reenter the journalism culture, where what happened a second ago is all that matters.

And so, bit by bit, all that great language we learned, the language of the sea and boat and of the elemental forces governing all, will start to fade. I know. This is life.

On the other hand, the sea will always be there and “Moon River,” our very own rogue island, will wait for the call, and I know now that as soon as we are afloat we will always be free.

There's no doubt: old friends – the ones you can go back to, with no questions asked – they're always the best.