Being at Sea

Wynne Hedlesky
Taioha'e, Nuku Hiva, French Polynesia
1125 local time, 0855 GMT

            After twenty days at sea, we arrived in Taioha’e Bay on the island of Nuku Hiva at around midnight. Smelly, salt-encrusted, and longing for a night’s rest without our beds pitching and rolling, we still had to navigate around jagged rocks at the mouth of the harbor, hoping that we had correctly interpreted the navigational aids. Thankfully, in a harbor as small as Taioha’e, they weren’t very complicated—one set of flashing red range markers, and one green buoy marking a dangerous rock half way down the bay (on the right, unlike in the United States). Slightly more challenging was finding an anchorage. There were several dozen sailboats and motor yachts scattered throughout the harbor, some stupidly without anchor lights. We kept our tired eyes peeled, and managed to successfully drop the hook on the second attempt. Frederic, the owner of Le Pelican, stayed awake to take bearings and make sure our anchorage was solid, and Kristian and I gratefully slept, this time without rolling onto each other or being packed like sardines against the wall of our cabin as the boat heeled.

            We awoke to a dramatically drizzly morning in Paradise. Being a high volcanic island, Nuku Hiva creates its own weather, and the heavy, gray clouds semi-permanently cloaking the peaks of the steep, verdant mountains dropped occasional cool showers. Aside from the overwhelming beauty of the mile-wide, bowl-shaped valley, I immediately and unexpectedly appreciated two things.

First, smells. Land has smells—earth, vegetation, decomposition, car exhaust, food cooking far away. The ocean doesn’t smell like much. Second, and of immense psychological importance, the boat was still. Well, relatively; the occasional ocean swell would still sneak in to the sheltered harbor. But compared to being on the open ocean, the anchorage was a long-awaited relief from the constant, harrowing fluctuation in local apparent down. On a boat on the open ocean, the laws of gravity are different. In order to even move around, one is compelled to follow the climber’s rule—three surfaces of contact at all times. Two feet on the ground will simply not suffice to keep you upright without a hand gripping a counter edge, or a bum pressed against a vertical. For instance, when I needed to use the head (that’s what we call a bathroom on a boat), I had to use both hands, and have my bum un-pressed against anything in order to pull down my pants. During this time I either had to endure a few desperate seconds where I risked face-planting the wall of the head if a big wave hit, or I had to wedge my shoulder against the head door for stability. Unlike in the normal world, where things generally stay where you put them, on a boat they tend to maliciously hurl themselves across the room when you least expect it. Beverages, playing cards, and small children seem especially prone to this.

This brings us to one of the other major psychological strains of my three-week, trans-Pacific adventure—children. As much as the unpredictable motion of, well, everything, and the stuffiness down below when we couldn’t open the hatches because of the spray, and the  inability to have a proper shower for three weeks, and the difficulty in sleeping while the boat was moving and heeling, and the various stress-inducing technical difficulties (such as the dysfunctional roller furling system, the rudder shaft leak, the diesel leak, the raw water cooling system leak, and the shortage of fresh water, to name the major ones), the main source of stress for those on board Le Pelican was the children, particularly the very young one. I believe I speak for all on board when I make this statement.

The Gillot family consists of a mother, Isabelle, a father, Frederic, and two quite wonderful children, Hakan, who is eight, and Charles, who is two. One lesson we all took from this experience is that two-year-olds and long sailing voyages are not necessarily a good mix. Charles spent about 70% of his time crying. I don’t blame him; being on a boat is scary, even for grown-ups. Who wants to be stuck on a tiny speck of fiberglass, thrown around twenty-four hours a day, surrounded by certain death? Due to the limited space of a sailboat, it’s also difficult to find ways to entertain young children. And due to the dangers inherent in life on a boat, young children also require constant attention. Between his frequent bouts of crying and his constant, unwitting attempts to throw himself into the path of danger, Charles had us all pretty worn out by the end of the trip.

I am a bit ashamed, but I must confess that thinking about the difficulties and discomforts of life at sea took up a good bit of my time. On June 20, four days before we reached the Marquesas, I wrote in my journal, “I’m ashamed of my current cowardice, my softness. I hate that I find myself grumbling, wishing for showers and beds and coffee and worrying about made-up (or even real) diseases while I’m in the middle of the greatest adventure of my life to date. I should be in awe of the sea every moment, overwhelmed by the sky, studying the subtleties of the sails and wind…If I expected this experience would instantly change my life, I guess I was wrong. If I thought I’d find God, fall deeply in love with the sea, or magically become a super sailor, I was wrong.”  And then, to compound it all, I was disappointed that I was disappointed.

This is what happens when you have expectations, when you undertake a project or a journey partially because of its narrative value for your life, because it makes a good story. Perhaps I expected, as I stated in the same journal entry, “to spend my days swooning in wonder, staring out over the sea, hair blowing in the wind.” I then noted, “In fact, your hair doesn’t blow because it’s a hideous matt of scalp oil and sunscreen, and, though the breeze is distressingly powerful and unceasing on deck, it never seems to have any interest in going through the tiny window and blowing around anything in your suffocating little cabin.”

Ok, I’ve said it; I’ve confessed that by some standards, three weeks at sea sucks. However, it is also sublimely beautiful, and at times beautifully something else.

The sublimely beautiful moments are what we all would expect from a life-changing, trans-Pacific sailing adventure. There was Getting Underway with Dolphins Playing at the Bow, there was The Most Beautiful Full Moon in the World Night, there was The Bioluminescent Plankton that Look like Stars Night. When the sun shone, the water was a freakish blue the color of the sky as seen at 30,000 feet, and you knew it was four miles deep because that’s what the chart says, even though that number is incomprehensible. Every night near the Equator the great Pacific Ocean put on its evening light show, with heaping cumulus clouds pink and glowing, and the orange sun, perpetually serene regardless of the chaotic sea state, burning its way down to the horizon. There were the infinite expressions of the sea, the subtle interactions of wind, water, and light. Some days it looked like a delicate, mirrored meringue, and other days, when the wind was high, climbing and descending the 20 foot seas was like traversing miniature mountain ranges, complete with snow-like, sea-foam peaks, and looking down into miniature glacial valleys. At night, the moon duplicated itself a million times on the surface of the sea and made a living, dancing carpet of light all the way to the horizon. The ocean rages and shines and writhes with life out there, whether anyone is around to see it or not. I was often shocked by this fact, that the vast Pacific plays almost every day for an empty theatre, and only the occasional reckless, half-mad human ventures far enough out of his element to witness it. In my journal, every day, I spilled ink trying to verbalize what is for the ocean as natural as breathing is to us.

That something is beautiful is relatively easy to comprehend. What is even more amazing is that the ocean is often something else—something not beautiful, but powerful in some other way. For example, the ocean is often very boring. Powerfully boring. So boring I could go for hours, reading a book, not even noticing it was there. I think that perhaps boredom is the only reaction one can have about the ocean sometimes. When it isn’t particularly beautiful or trying to kill you, it’s just big, and your mind is largely protected from the shock of realizing just how frighteningly big it is by its inability to fully, or even partially, comprehend the ocean’s vastness. You look out over it, to the horizon, and it’s like two dumb, brutish creatures indifferently occupying the same space; like an ant crawling on the back of a lion.

At other times, it does feel like the ocean is trying to kill you, and then it’s just scary. My night watches were frightening for the first few days. We were sailing more or less down wind, in relatively high seas, constantly under the threat of an accidental jibe. Sitting at the helm, alone, with the bimini and dodger up, I couldn’t see much of the sky, the sails, or what was in front of me. The stern light right next to me more or less ruined my night vision, so I was effectively deprived of my sense of sight and relied primarily on the anemometer and compass to stick to the correct heading. I could feel the boat unpredictably tossing in the waves, and I could hear the water washing everywhere. In the middle of the ocean, I was actually experiencing claustrophobia. It took some effort to convince myself we weren’t just spinning in circles in the dark, or about to capsize. As Kristian pointed out to me, it’s not often that you just plow ahead without being able to see where we you’re going. A person would never do that anywhere else. Cars don’t have autopilot; it would be dangerous even to walk blind. But there’s not a lot to hit on the open ocean, and even if something were there, if it didn’t have navigation lights it would be almost impossible to see anyway.

There was also the much-anticipated equatorial crossing. We crossed the line on my watch, at exactly 2324 PST on June 19. It was a dark, cloudy night, and I was reading a book on the not-yet-defunct Kindle in order to distract myself form the combination of boredom and anxiety that was my usual mental state during night watches. As we neared, Kristian and I went down below and loitered around the GPS display, waiting excitedly for the moment. Kristian practiced taking photos of the display so that when the time came, our money shot wasn’t obscured by an odd reflection on the display or something like that. All the excitement woke up Frederic, whose cabin is right next to the chart table. He didn’t seem to mind, and even got into the spirit of the moment with us a bit. All together, it was like a very mellow New Year’s Eve countdown. Kristian’s picture came out perfectly—photographic evidence that we were in fact there, at the magic line, entering the other side of the world. Afterwards, I went back up on deck and continued to read my book.

The next day, little had changed; we were still surrounded by water. The Pacific still put on its daily show. But now that we’re in Nuku Hiva, I realize we have entered a different world, and the miles of ocean crossed are proportional to the difference between this place and the United States. One of the things our new friends here on Nuku Hiva taught us was how to find the Southern Cross, and that, along with learning to eat raw crabs and roast breadfruit, is helping me start to feel the anticipated sensation of embracing the unfamiliar. I look forward to many more passages, difficult or easy, and many more unfamiliar shores materializing out of the haze on the horizon.