Offshore

I did not anticipate the smell.

We actually sailed into Tortola - the breeze picked up as we approached Thatch Island, just after the crew woke me up, around 7 this morning. My last watch was from midnight-2am, and we were still about 50 miles out by the time I went below for a sleep. I left the owner's son, Aaron at the helm, a ship close by to starboard, the loom of St. Thomas just appearing off the bow. The moon was setting in the west, and had disappeared behind a cloud bank just before I went below. There was a space beneath the clouds, however, and I told Aaron to keep a lookout for the setting moon, as I anticipated it being a marvelous sight.

David woke me at 7. We were motoring, as we had been when I was on watch, the mainsail sheeted flat, no jib, powering along at 7 knots. By now we were right on top of the islands, less than 4 miles from the finish line, between Tortola and Thatch Island. It was a good feeling, having slept through the monotony of the approach, awakening just as things were getting exciting, as we arrived.

I didn't want to wake up, in truth. I was in a deep sleep - I had only slept about 4 hours before my watch, when I could have slept 8 - I ended up finishing my 5th book of the passage, and completing the radio sched instead of retiring to my bunk forward. Which was all well and good at the time, but when David roused me at 7, I felt I needed a few more hours to be fully refreshed.

But I went on deck anyway, chipper in attitude because we were nearly there. And then I smelled land.

I recall reading this in the books I've devoured over the last few years. And I should well have experienced it in my own right, having done half a dozen or so offshore deliveries. But the simple smell of the islands, the flowery and smoky fragrance that wafted over the boat as we rounded West End triggered wonderful emotions from my previous visits here over the past three years, emotions that I wasn't prepared for, that caught me off guard and made me realize how much I'd missed this place, the tropics. For all the crowded harbors and charter boats, there is something here beyond comprehension that makes it feel absolutely wonderful to return.

Only smells and sounds can produce those feelings, I believe. For what I saw I have seen before, what I felt I have felt before, and what I smelled I have smelled before - yet it was only that smell which triggered the memories within me, the timelessness, the calming...it's indescribable, really - and I had never expected it.

For the entire summer I have been dreaming of winter, of recharging my batteries after an insanely hot and humid season on the Chesapeake. I haven't had a winter in the past two or three years in fact, at least not an entire season. The thought of retiring to the dark and cold of Sweden this year has been appealing, indeed very much so considering the sweltering we took in July and August. And yet, though the sun baked down upon us as we entered the islands, I felt invigorated by the smell, and beyond that, I can't describe it. It was there, and it was good.

"Music for the Open Minded"

I'm in Oxford living in a barn. 

What's nice about the barn is that is has a washer/dryer that has just finished cleaning and drying my dirty clothing that has accumulated on the boat for the past week or so. 

I'm here because I've been busy finding work doing whatever will make me some money and satisfy my soul, which is a difficult combination, because money does not satisfy the soul. I'm refitting Steve's "pocket rocket," his 25-foot Seaward sloop which sits in the swamp that used to be his backyard behind the barn. My front window has an extraordinary view towards the Choptank River and Chesapeake Bay beyond, and I have about  5 acres of land on the peaceful eastern shore to myself for the next few days.

I haven't been writing in here for a while, and that is a shame. Ever since I started trying to get paid to write, I've neglected the outlet that has gotten me there in the first place. It's extremely frustrating, because when I think about the stories I wrote from Austria and Germany during my stay in Prague, they were written only for myself, only to relive in my mind what had been happening in my life, and there was no motive outside of that. Writing to get published has been fun, but just isn't the same. I must continue to write for myself and simply continue these streams of consciousness to keep it pure.

That said, my professional writing career is continually on the upswing. Just today I confirmed two more monthly columns, bringing the grand total to three. "All at Sea" magazine, based in the Caribbean, will be publishing my ideas on seamanship once a month starting in June. The first article will focus on catamaran sailing and how to get the best performance out of a cruising cat. July's issue will be about anchoring under sail and the joy that accompanies it. Of course, there will be a quote from Moitessier...

"Transitions Abroad," the online magazine that's been devoted to helping people discover travel (as opposed to tourism) since 1977, will be featuring my thought and ideas on "Adventure Travel." They've already published four previous, unrelated pieces about various topics from sailing to study abroad, and have agreed to give me a column on adventure. Gregory Hubbs, the editor, and I have had some enlightening email exchanges about our ideas of adventure, travel and tourism, and he has been without a doubt the best and most accesible editor I've ever dealt with in my short career.

Which leads me to my idea of adventure. I've been trying to get this on paper ever since I started thinking about my new column, which has been nearly 12 hours now! My idea of adventure is a state of mind. Anything can be adventurous if you let yourself go. Driving across the Bay Bridge and living in a barn while working on a small sailboat in peaceful natural surroundings while enjoying cleansing solitude is adventurous in my book, as much so as hiking in New Zealand. Yes, I'd rather be hiking in New Zealand, but you make the best of what you're given. 

Adventure requires a lack of planning, a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants attitude where "no" is never the correct response. Think of all the opportunities you've let slip by with that simple two-letter word. A stupid yet useful example I like to use is the sale of my Range Rover. It was winter I think (at least 'wintry' outside), and I'd gotten a phone call from Johnny, a Haitian man from NYC asking me to drive the Rover up to Manhattan, sell him the car for $1200 cash, and take the Amtrak back to Philly, which he'd pay for. Of course, my instinct was to say "no" immediately and hang up the phone, which is exactly what I did. But upon reflection, I'd wanted to sell the car to avoid the expenses and create some tension and adventure in my daily life, so why not start immediately? I phoned him back and agreed to his terms, leaving instantly in a snow flurry, and driving halfway to Manhattan before telling anyone I'd left. I didn't want the opportunity to be squashed by anyone else's conservatism. We made the transaction in an alleyway near Madison Square Garden and I walked to Penn Station with a wad of $20's in my coat pocket feeling like a drug dealer. My heart was pounding - I had a smile plastered on my face too.

I guess adventure is really anything that makes your pulse race, pumps your adrenaline and forces you to exist in the present, for a moment, a week or a lifetime. I recall landing in Fiji two and a half years ago, staying in that deserted hostel in Pacific Harbor and staring at the ceiling while I listened to the 'American Analog Set' and cried inward tears of homesickness, wondering what I'd gotten myself into and why. I could not escape the present as hard as I tried, and I had a queasy feeling in my gut - not one of sickness, but one of the unknown. It took me a while to fall asleep that night, yet ironically the next day was one of the most memorable days of my life thanks to a group of recently unemployed Fijians I encountered sitting roadside under a mango tree drinking cava. 

Not unrelated, about six months later I was sitting at my job in Maryland, far from that previous adventure yet experiencing a similar feeling to the one I had that night in bed. I was about to register for the Black Bear Half Ironman Triathlon in Jim Thorpe, PA. I'd raced a marathon before, competed in sports in high school, and was an exercise phanatic, but this was beyond my realm of experience. The marathon had taken me just under 4 hours to complete and was the single most difficult thing I've ever done. This Half Ironman, by my estimates, should take closer to six hours. 

I was scared. That same queasy feeling I had in Fiji came right back, but I clicked the 'register' button anyway. The commitment was made, now I just needed to follow through on it. Turns out my fears were unnecessary. I won the freaking race in my age group, finishing in five hours, thiry-seven minutes, completing the greatest athletic achievement of my young life. 

The point is that adventure lies in the unknown, and we as humans fear the unknown, and this fear of the unknown forces one to live in the present, really live in the present not just attempt to (in the case of true adventure, you have no choice in the matter). As  it pertains to travel, and ultimately to the column I'm supposed to write, I'll have to work on that. But thinking about it these past hours has really made me remember what is important in my life, and how I need to have one of those queasy feelings pronto to get back on track and start enjoying life again, in the present. 

I'm leaving for Sweden in less than three weeks. Mia is currently in Morocco, and based on our all-too-brief phone conversation today, Morocco is exactly like I imagine it and I am incredibly jealous of her good fortune in being there. I have a reasonably good idea of what my life will be like in the coming months. Yet despite the known quantities of it, there is still enough of the unknown to qualify it as an adventure. It's what keeps me going.

St. Thomas to Annapolis

I was going through security at the Ft. Lauderdale airport, and it was no surprise when the pulled me out of line. "Bag check!" yelled the agent behind the x-ray machine. They whisked me away behind the counter, sans flip-flops. A gloved TSA worker curiously examined the varnished wooden box I'd been carrying. Apparently he had never seen a sextant.

Once convinced that I wasn't a terrorist but merely a boat captain, he gave back my flip-flops and my treasured sextant, and I was on my way. I was en route to St. Thomas to deliver a new Fountaine Pajot Salina 48 catamaran back home to Annapolis, and the voyage would count as the qualifying passage towards my Yachtmaster Oceans endorsement. 

We sailed the morning after I arrived, three others and myself. It was a blustery, rainy day and we only made it as far as Lindberg's Cove on the south side of St. Thomas, electing to wait out the weather. Besides, it was a Friday (the 13th, no less), so I was perfectly content not to tempt the gods on Day One.

The weather forecast for the first 48 hours of our trip called for near gale-force winds, and from the NE, with 10-14 foot seas, not exactly ideal, especially on a cat (and a new one at that). Instead of romping headlong into the fresh nor'easter, we elected to sail south and west, the long way round Puerto Rico, and follow along the eastern edge of the Bahamas, keeping well-clear of the islands, yet giving us an outlet if it got particularly nasty. 

Sweetest Thing was a rocketship off the wind, and in the lee of P.R. we notched 16 knots in the puffs, while the boat's proud owner stood at the helm, a ridiculous grin plastered on his face. We power-reached along the south coast in record time, rounding Cabo Rojo and entering the Mona Passage before midnight. Once clear of land, I got out my sextant and we went back in time.

In his book, Celestial Navigation in a Nutshell, Hewitt Schlereth sums up how most people feel about celestial: "From just about the first moment you set foot on a boat, you heard two things talked of in hushed tones, Cape Horn and celestial navigation." Celestial has always seemed to me a pastime of only the great sailors, the world-voyagers like Moitessier and Hal Roth. In their books, they speak of it with reverence, yet never seem to give away it's secrets. Moitessier, in fact, shipwrecked two of his beloved boats before finally realizing he seriously needed to learn this magic, yet when he finally mastered the art, to him it became "child's play."

Voyaging sailors often talk of the "noon-site," and daily runs are typically recorded by measuring the distance between these sights, thereby giving a nice round 24-hour mileage mark. While the noonsite is incredibly useful (it can give you your latitude with minimal calculations), in my mind, it's time consuming and redundant. Once you master celestial, standing around waiting for the sun to reach it's apex in the sky while tediously measuring it's altitude every minute or so seems awfully boring. I prefer to simply take a morning sight and a sight sometime around noon. Reducing the sights is less magic and more rote memorization, and once you get the hang of it, it becomes second nature, and can be done in a matter of a few minutes. By advancing the morning sight along your DR, you get a nice neat fix at noon, longitude included, something the noonsite cannot give you with a realistic degree of accuracy. 

As we sailed northwest in hopes of catching a ride on the Gulf Stream near Savannah, the wind eased and the weather was perfect. Once clear of the Abacos, we hoisted the big genneker and comfortably reached along on a flat sea. 

"Give me a ship and a star to steer her by." Sounds nice and romantic. In reality, navigating by the stars doesn't even occur at night. Which is why I found myself up at sunrise and sunset every day, regardless of my watch, sextant in hand, waiting for the first rays of dawn or the last glow of daylight to illuminate the horizon enough to give me a clear sight. In the evening, Venus shown incredibly brilliant on the western horizon just after sunset, and every night I'd log her altitude and plot a line of position. On clear nights, I crossed Venus with Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, and Rigel, giving a nice, neat three-star fix, the most accurate way to navigate with a sextant. 

After 5 days, the fixes on the chart arced an even curve towards Hatteras. The weather was so nice that we kept sailing on a beam reach, and never did catch the Gulf Stream until Hatteras. The notorious Cape did not live up to it's nasty reputation; instead, the wind died completely and we motored the last few hundred miles in thick fog. My last sight was a line of position that put us about 25 miles east of the Cape, and was the last time we'd see the sun for the rest of the trip.

Returning to the Chesapeake by sailboat, and after 1800 miles at sea, is something I was very much looking forward to. It was unfortunate that we didn't actually see our return - we navigated through the Bay Bridge-Tunnel by GPS, giving security calls on the VHF every 5 minutes to warn the shipping traffic. The weather turned sour that night, and we made the trip up the Bay in rain, headwinds and fog, dodging frequent shipping traffic and bracing for the cold. Despite the terribly conditions, it was immensely satisfying to plot our position on the chart as we passed the familiar landmarks coming up the Bay.

We motored past Thomas Point early the next morning, barely visible from only a few miles away due to the weather. It was cold and dreary at the helm, but nice to be so close to home. My hands were numb by the time the last dockline was secured, but I was satisfied. We'd completed an 1800-mile passage in 11 days, with a short stop in Marsh Harbor, and I'd navigated the old-fashioned way. There is something special about finding your position on a chart after patiently waiting for the sun to burst through the clouds, something romantic about searching the night sky to identify the stars before the coming dawn fades them from view. After learning to navigate electronically, this departure from the chartplotter and into the real-world was an extremely satisfying feeling. Schlereth again puts it best; "Why learn celestial navigation? Because it will satisfy your soul."