Sketches of Sea

Ships, oceans, journeys, currents – they are nothing if not excellent metaphor fodder. So, let us begin with The Endless Metaphor of Steering a Boat:

Steering: Two hours on, six hours off. Wake at 3.45am, fumble for glasses, water bottle, hoodie. Stumble outside as the boat rocks hard in the swell, a greeting and briefing from the person currently on the wheel:

“270 degrees on the GPS, 255 on the compass. Swell has calmed a bit. The sails will jibe below 240 so be careful. Enjoy.” Wish them a peaceful sleep, take a piss, then settle down at the wheel. A moment or two to set the boat on a good course using the GPS, then look at the stars and find one to line up the mast with. Check the horizon for any other boats. Wonder where the moon is. Find it sneaking over the horizon to the east.

And now I am fully awake, the sea and the sky all mine, perhaps the only sentient being for hundreds of miles in all directions (if you don’t count the dolphins). Orion the constant constellation, the plough up there too since we got into the northern hemisphere, its handle dipping down to the ocean as if reaching for water to boil. The milky way to the south, an optical illusion of depth and yellow-blue mist and unhinged beauty. Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, direct ahead, or is it Jupiter?

I have an app that would tell me, give me its distance and position, but I have learnt that any distraction, even listening to music (apart from most latin music, which my brain seems to zone out of almost immediately, probably because it is made for dancing), lessens my steering ability. Because it is easy to keep a rough course, taking occasional evasive action when a swell from behind knocks the stern one way or the other, fluctuating within a 40 degree range, at the edges of which a big wave may tip the boat in a way that may rouse sleeping crewmates.

I realised after a week or so, however, that with full concentration and proactive steering, it is possible to keep the boat on a course within a 10 degree fluctuation, even in big swells and/or going pretty fast. One needs to feel the boat, the back and the front, and interpret each twitch in terms of what is going to happen five or ten seconds in the future, and adjust accordingly, perhaps just a couple of inches on the wheel. And then as the waves come in from behind or to the side, a bigger turn of the wheel, and there comes a point where you can feel the boat pushing against the rudder, and you hold the rudder there, matching the pressure but not exceeding it, maybe half a second or a second, and then the boat softens against your hands, all those tons of steel pivoted by some feeble flesh, and the boat rights itself back onto course.

And then you get smug, and think you are the zen master of boat steering, and the mind wanders off to what you are going to conquer next, and in these moments concentration is lost and the boat creeps off course, allowing a big wave to hit it at a right angle, and then another, and suddenly you are overcompensating, and the boat is jeering at you as it flicks back the other way, rocking, the water slapping hard against the tipping sides, and it takes a minute to start back over, finding the star, checking the GPS, feeling amateur but determined.

Life: 16 hours on, 8 hours off. Each at the wheel of our own boat, a task we take very seriously indeed. The rest of the metaphor kind of explains itself…

My favourite watch is 5-7am: sunrise. The watch begins in the dark and any music I might listen to (the wind vane is working now and we don’t have to steer) must be brooding – Gil Scott Heron’s Pieces of a Man, Cinematic Orchestra’s Everyday, Rachmaninov’s Vespers. And then the smudgiest smear of light grey in the east and I swear some chemical reaction takes place in my brain and I am more awake, as if a little extra oxygen is reaching each cell. And the music changes from brooding to brewing, and me and the sky, good mates by now, slowly receive light and lightness that swell up to an intense but fragile euphoria. I hug my knees to my chest and think of people and think of no one and just watch the rays slide around the cloud, no sound but the occasional slap of a wave on the hull, always taking longer than you think, and then BOOM it is up and a  minute later you feel it in your skin and ten minutes after that the rose red clouds and creamy rays have disappeared, it is morning, the day has come and it so happens that you are alive. The sun is working itself up to a heat you need to hide from and you best find your hat.

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The daily wash: squatting naked on the poop deck – a tiny deck just above the water line on the back of the boat. Attached by a harness incase of slippage. Pre-soaped up, dipping each limb one at a time and scrubbing as water sluices either side of you at around five miles an hour. Next,  grab on to the rope and dip in the whole lower body to your torso, holding on tight as you are dragged along like a fishing lure, refreshing to the max. And then, finally, dunking your head in as the boat rocks from side to side, in and out like a rollercoaster, water up your nose guaranteed, but wooo! Overall nice feeling.

Yesterday, dangling my legs in, we caught a yellow fin tuna, and I rushed back up to deck to bring it in. We put the line in again and another tuna bit straight away, but there was a big commotion in the water and when we got it on deck, 2/3rds of it had been bitten clean off by a shark. I finished of my wash on deck with a bucket.

‘Fish!’ – One of the reels buzzes out and someone shouts ‘fish!’. The nearest person grabs the line and starts reeling in. Another person grabs a bucket and the rusty Killing Knife and we watch to see the type and size of the fish as it is pulled closer and then lifted on board. If it is a fighter, someone leans on it with a large chopping board whilst another waggles the knife around in the fish’s brain and gills until it stops moving.  The cat licks her lips and starts squarking. On passages our usual catch is tuna – yellow fin, bonito, dogtooth – or mayi mayi, all good meat, and the captain’s taste for sashimi has grown on me. Millimetre thin slices of raw meat taken from the tender top of the fish are dipped in sashimi sauce (a heady mix of oil, jam, oyster sauce, ginger, soy sauce, lemon juice) or plain soy sauce. Not cooking it allows the gentle and subtley different flavours of each fish to come through. The rest of the fillets are baked or, if anyone can be bothered, rolled in flour and fried. In the event of catching a fish with more meat than four people can eat in 24 hours (we have no fridge), some portions are rolled in curry powder and turmeric and left to dry on strings on the edge of the boat. This is torture for the cat, and she acts like a crack head with a big rock just out of reach, pissing and moaning all day.

I should probably talk here a bit about the cat, called Cat, a white and ginger animal with no tail who has been on the boat for 10 years and will complete her circumnavigation of the globe when the boat reaches the phillipines.

I have always been suspicious of the way domesticated cats seem to be in complete control of their human owners, and contemptuous of people who treat cats like humans (if you really think this thing is a person why don’t you make it go out and get a job like you do your human children?). Dogs I understand. Cats are a)a distraction from the real business of learning to interact better with each other as humans and forwarding the revolution in general b) another reason the seas are emptying of fish so quickly c)the most boring topic of conversation I can possibly imagine. When things get bad, people talk to, or about, their cats. Why don’t they sort their problems out instead? I know with these statements I am alienating half my readership, but these have been my hitherto undisclosed feelings on the matter for quite some time. Probably because I didn’t grow up around animals. Possibly because cats don’t give me the attention and validation I secretly crave from every emotional being. Who knows. But if I have every pretended to be in any way interested in what your cat does, eats or thinks, or those of any cats you have seen on the internet, I was lying and think you are mad.

However, I have been living with this cat for seven months now and we have had a chance to size each other up. She is a particularly moany specimen, will let you stroke her for a while and then scratch or bite for no reason, and on the rainy, bumpy,  two week journey from the Marquesas to Fanning Island she pissed in my bed twice. I had to sleep somewhere else and wait ten days before we got to land and I could wash the smell out of my mattress. This did little to nurture my love. So for a time we lived in a state of silent, non-eye contact war, like two people stuck in a marriage for the sake of their kids. In my mind I cast her as Putin the aggressor, and me as litvenyenko the truth telling but ultimately doomed hero.  Occasionally I would accidently stand on her, and not feel at all sorry. However, as part of my current attempt at having a ‘flexible mind’, where I try and let go of preconceptions and unquestioned opinions and instead make judgements based on my actual sense perceptions and reason, I have tried making friends with the cat. I started to cut the bones out of the fish I gave her and patted her a bit now and then. I try and imagine she is actually a person that happens not to be able to speak. The results have been vaguely positive. She hasn’t changed her behaviour towards me at all, except she occasionally comes and licks my armpit when I am lying down and then curls up in the crook of my arm for a bit. I wonder if she is fed up being stuck on a rolling boat with a constantly shifting cast of characters who don’t understand her desires. But give me a wild animal glimpsed from afar, doing it’s wild thing, any day. Poor cat. (Update: it is a few weeks later now and we are developing a tentative fondness for each other)

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Excitement: Changing the sail at night. Which only happens if the weather changes suddenly or, worst case scenario, a sail rips (we have had a few worst case scenarios). Tom shouts ‘everybody up!’ in an urgent sort of a way and within 20 seconds people are putting on harnesses and not mentioning that they are about to get soaking wet and cold. Two or three people run to the foremast, a fast jiggle timed to avoid the extremities of the boat’s roll, and clip themselves to something solid. The waves fizz and boil, rodeoing the boat back and forth. The wind howls and the rain comes in at various angles. If someone fell off the side in weather like this, it would be very hard to find them, and herein lies some of the excitement. Sometimes there is lightning. Instructions are relayed down the line.  Sails are dropped, hauled in, unclipped and tied down. Ropes exchanged, new sails attached to cables, and then a couple of people pull hard on ropes and winches as the new sail is raised. There are inevitably complications, and each of us has had to climb the rigging or dangle off the side once or twice to rescue a swinging rope or untangle a halyard. The biggest morsels of bravery happen in the split second and go unnoticed, though the coolest thing I saw was when Laura was literally held by her ankles and lowered down to untangle the anchor as a particularly nasty storm was dragging the boat towards some rocks. Blow wind blow! Each of us containing a scream of both fear and ecstacy as we work, soaking wet and full of adrenaline.

And then we all huddle together in the cockpit, dripping, to see if the adjustments have worked. The odd rueful comment about having to get the sowing machine out again. Maybe we go back out, or maybe it is time for strategic dumping of wet clothes in plastic bags, lying back on damp sheets, counting hours of sleep till next watch and dreaming of a big plate of egg and chips with thick slices of ham at a Yorkshire pub as the boat pounds on through the night.