by Arwen
The vastness of the distance surrounding us is inperceptable. The ocean breathes despite us, the wind filling it with wealth.
In the space between the sun and the sea floor all of the elements collaborate to create a roaring force we are transients of. I’m not sure if it’s a battle raging, or impassioned dance steps crossing this spanse of water larger than any land on earth.
In the distance clouds cry into the crusting fractal sea that taunts the sky with it’s peaks in random order. Squalls either smudge the horizon or etch it like fibreglass.
I’m surprised to welcome the rain for the first time, begging it to cross our path and freshen my salty nested mane. Constant rainbows within reach of our course stretch to meet their own downward slope, colouring the sea sky world of the endless endless.
At night the luminance in our wake emulates the bright night heavens and I wonder if they are the same. The moon rises into the Milky Way “laying silver foil on the sea,” deserving a Stanley Kubrick soundtrack. Most impressive of all, stars care slices into the sky almost as often as debris passes by.
Our path is trimmed by degrees on a horizon we can’t perceive as we carve forward our future.
The ocean course is decided and definite. In life we stumble without the guidance of the wind and tide – able to only blindly will our way through the oblivion, only hoping we’ve chosen the right point of sail.
“He who starts on a ride of two or three thousand miles may experience, at the moment of departure, a variety of emotions. He may feel excited, sentimental, anxious, carefree, heroic, roistering, picaresque, introspective, or practically anything else; but above all he must and will feel like a fool.”
-Peter Fleming, News From Tartary
“Making open water passages in a small sailboat is like descending into a tunnel. At any given time, between any two bodies of land, there must be a handful of sailboats progressing from one to the other. The circumstances of weather and current are probably similar for each, but in the course of the passage, these boats remain ignorant of one another. The departure is made with dozens of masts visible astern but they slowly sink below the horizon, and then there is only your boat, and yourself. You may know that those boats you left behind are planning to follow you in a few days, but that knowledge has no relation to your circumstances at sea. Out there, it is as if the world has disappeared.
When you arrive at your destination, there will again be a forest of masts in a large harbour- and the people on those boats will well know the sorts of trouble you’ve had with fickle winds and squalls. But they will not know the particular squalls you have known, and so there remains the impression that only YOU have made that particular trip, that only YOU became quite that lonely out there, frustrated at winds that always blow in your face.”
– Kevin Patterson, The Waters In Between
Note: Arwen Hunter is a documentary filmer extraordinaire from Gamut Productions as is aboard Khulula to document the Gyre, as well as Hugh and Bryson drinking tea.