Location: Underway to Nuku Hiva
We’re still coasting along with four sails up, making good time towards one of our final waypoints, where we will gybe and head north-west to Nuku Hiva.
The ocean’s slow, undulating swells lift us up and roll us over – sometimes it’s hard to imagine how anyone is sleeping down below as we dip the booms down towards water that froths underneath our caprail. The waxing moon has given us so much light the last few night watches; I can see the expressions on my watch team’s faces (and sometimes their eyelids). The first hour of watch starts slowly as everyone recovers from being yanked out of their dreams, and then all of a sudden two hours on the helm has gone by and we’ve discussed every fruit-based dessert we can’t wait to eat the next time we have fruit, horror movies we wouldn’t watch again, and stories that start with every letter of the alphabet.
Someone always asks what day of passage this is, but I try not to keep count. It’s either a day that feels like just the start of a long journey, when you’ve still got most of the way to go. Or it’s somewhere in the middle, where the days behind you and ahead of you stretch out, and it seems like this is all you’ve ever done (this is where it feels like we are right now). Or you’re almost there, and every day someone says, “I can’t believe we get there in X days!”. I think it’s almost time to start counting down the days.
My watch team began today with the 8-12 watch. Over the years, I’ve found that the tone of each day tends to be set by how you spend your earliest waking hours – either on the 12-4 am watch, the 4-8, or the 8-12.
Since the 12-4 takes place completely in the dark, no one ever remembers that this is actually the start of our day. We talk about today as if it is tomorrow, so this block of time that we’re awake for now stands completely on its own, floating, untethered to any date. This is the time when it makes the most sense to have nonsensical conversations and wonder if there are aliens or multiverses. Once it’s over and you go back to sleep, it’s almost as if you dreamt it.
The 4-8 sometimes feels like you’ve stood two watchesthe pre-sunrise night watch, where you still have constellations and bioluminescence. On my watch team, we play FORB, where we guess what time the full orb of the sun will be visible on the horizon. Sometimes it’s so dark that you think maybe this morning the sun isn’t planning on rising. But inevitably it does, and then you get the post-sunrise morning watch. This is the perfect time where there’s enough sun for it to be light out, but it hasn’t gotten hot yet. Then, just when the light starts to be bright enough to hurt your eyes, your watch ends, and you can close them again.
The 8-12 feels like you’re getting up to go to work. You make your commute to the cockpit, and then everyone takes turns getting their coffee and breakfast, and you have to have your sunscreen on, and it’s very obvious if you come to watch in your pajamas. With jobs to do, it can sometimes go by the fastest – time flies when you’re washing dinghies and learning knots and inventorying the bilges.
Sometimes, a day on passage can feel like the universe is conspiring against you. It might be that it’s your job to take out the trash, and it’s day 13 of passage, so that entails cleaning and crushing 30 cans. Maybe you’re the chef and you had the 4-8 am watch, so instead of going back to be,d it’s time to get in the galley and start cooking. You have an exam, but you also had the 8-12 watches, so you had no time to cram…
But then there are the days where the universe conspires for you, and you get a sky full of stars on your 12-4 watch, and mysterious flashing lights that give your watch team hours of conversation. During your 4-8 am watch, you listen as the motor turns off and you raise the main sail while the clouds are dyed orange by the sun rising. A tuna is caught and brought up on deck, just as you were starting to crave ceviche. A pod of whales passes by, spouting mist into the air. The sun is setting, and everyone has stayed up on deck after clean-up to listen to music together and watch as another day turns into night.
When I realized I had to write the blog tonigh,t I was glad that we’d been busy today – I would have so many tasks and activities to list off. But then I felt that it might be more interesting to try to explain how a day on passage can feel – it could be any day, not necessarily this one. If a year from now none of us can remember exactly what we ate for lunch today, this blog won’t be any help. But maybe it will remind us of how it felt to be a part of Vela’s crew, working our way across the Pacific.