Location: Dominica
Morning rain floated like mist from the Dominican mountains, brushing the cheeks of the Argo crew as they gathered for brekkie. The sun’s light came fluid, wafting down the valley towards the gently rocking schooner, a burnished cloud with twisting tendrils curling about her twin masts while hands busied beneath the task of loading breakfast bowls with burritos. These sailors are no strangers to eating their meals in the rain, but this is a mere Caribbean drizzle, fleeting as the clouds themselves and warm as a hug. They might shiver at the memory of breakfast in the rain beneath snow-capped mountains. Almerimar, Europe. That all feels very far away now. A couple of thousand miles of measurable distance, but immeasurable, is the change from who they were back then. There’s a growing up, a coming of age, and a maturation of the sailor who makes landfall after an ocean crossing. The Atlantic is not a soft teacher.
But these sailors have been running another race, and today, the finish line has come into view as they each sit before a chart, armed with dividers, a plotter, and their wits to conquer NavMaster. The first group took the morning sitting, filling the salon with charts of Chesapeake Bay while the rest of the crew geared up to tackle their Underwater Navigation Adventure dive for Advanced Open Water. They’ve all found True, not the version of themselves that had been previously repressed, but that of North. True North. And they could all now tell you that should you ever find yourself in the York Spit Channel, your True North takes the shape of the now iconic Wolf Trap Light. But they’ve also found their course to be true, straight, and true. This they know because all managed to return to the starting point of their compass exercises beneath the blue wobbly stuff. A few may have taken wandering paths to the endpoint, but they all did get there eventually. The waters of Dominica resemble a pleasant bathtub in temperature and clarity, and while the dive students were swimming circles (squares) around us, we could watch them all the while at a distance of 100ft.
Later in the afternoon, a small group embarked on a journey to the murkier depths beyond the reaches of red light to a crushing distance of 100ft below the sanctuary of breathable atmosphere. During this deep training dive, they were shown how water filters out the colors of the light spectrum one at a time, where reds and oranges become dull greys and browns until artificial light is provided to bring back their bursting colors. They took a cognition test both before and during the dive to test for the intoxicating effects of nitrogen narcosis, where all passed without stumbling on the simple task of counting from 1 to 20 before making the slow ascent to off-gas the absorbed nitrogen in their bodies tissue.
Finally, as the sun dripped from the cloud base on its final descent to the horizon, all above deck became awash in orange, where something in the light gave a regal blessing to this moment. Dell celebrated the day with a magical spread of cookies, the aroma of which filled the vessel with a Christmassy nostalgia.
These are the days.