the water in, but wear a mitt so splashes can’t burn your hand. It smells utterly ambrosial. Stir the whole mess, spoon it into bowls, and eat like kings only wish they could, sitting in the cockpit in the middle of a wild sea on a beautiful night that few ever get to witness. Every cell in you is humming with life; even your nauseated mitochondria. We knew from the medical training


that dehydration is a constant threat, but who wants to drink or eat much when it means you’ll only end up having to go below to ride the wild toilet? (Peeing over the side is one of the most commonly reported ways men fall overboard, so not a good idea.) Drink you must, and from bottles that have narrow openings so you don’t dump it down your neck. We each monitored our own fluid consumption, and made sure we nibbled enough variety to cover basic food needs. Staying out of that kind of trouble is a duty, not an indulgence. After four days Karen wanted to yell


“Stop that!” to the crazy corkscrewing motion brought on by increasing wind and wave. Night watches were a three- hour struggle in cold damp mist to stay


awake and alert, followed by three hours of sleep and another watch. Anything that required working belowdecks—updating the navigation, ship’s log, or checking in on the Ham radio Pacific Seafarer’s Net—was a recipe for more seasickness. And finally, there is a getting used


to, an accommodation, an acceptance, of the motion, the uncertainty, the flow, to the point where none of that bothers you much anymore (but you still do pay attention to weather forecasts.) And you realize then that you could live out here for a time, and not be such a queasy foreigner.


But oh my God, the things we saw… We saw more black-footed albatross


than we could imagine, swooping by on six-foot wingspans and gazing at us with large dark eyes; shearwaters and northern fulmars skimming wavetops; and acrobatic storm petrels, so fragile and graceful you could weep. Our wake glowed with bioluminescence like a heavenly scratch. Crystalline blue water just behind the white foam of breaking waves. The gift of a starry night like nobody on land ever sees,


with the Milky Way so clear and close it makes you gasp at the thought of your own mortal molecules of billion year- old stardust, rented for a few decades, being so very transient.


On living a dream: You need no excuse to say, “Excuse


me while I kiss the sky,” and no embarrassment is necessary when the sky kisses back, tongue and all. If living lightly on the planet while living one’s dream is judged to be an abandonment of responsibility or of one’s usefulness in the workaday world, then we have abdicated our core values and embraced the distracted, dreamless, functional insanity of these times.


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For the full, more detailed and philosophical version and more pictures of Karen and Jim’s passage, along with updates, visit the Cruisers Blogs at www.48north.com


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48° NORTH, SEPTEMBER 2011 PAGE 33


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