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Windleblo - Day Seventeen



There's something about sailing at night that arouses the senses.

During the day, we keep the bimini, our canvas cockpit "roof," over the cockpit to shield us from the sun. At sundown, the bimini folds away, opening the cockpit to the night sky.

Just after sunset today, a waxing moon hovers directly overhead. The sky is clear. The moon shines like a big spotlight, bathing the boat in soft light. Soon, my evening watch is over and John starts his. I turn in for a couple hours sleep as one by one the planets and then the moon follow the sun over the western horizon.

My next watch is at 6 a.m. on the ship's clock. But that's 6 a.m. Universal Time. We've now moved more than 37.5 degrees west of the Prime Meridian, which means my watch starts at 3 a.m. local time, well after moonset and well before sunrise. The sky is at its darkest.

The rest of the crew is fast asleep. It is only me, the boat, the night, and the sea. There are 20 knots of following wind and six foot waves on top of six foot following swell, all combining to move us forward at eight knots with a moderate, steady pitching and rolling.

Looking up from my cockpit perch, first I see the shadowy shapes of the mainsail and genoa spread before me on each side of the mast. Higher, the tricolor navigation light shines reassuringly at the top of the mast. Beyond, no clouds obscure the stars.

Stars shine vividly across the sky. Several constellations jump out at me -- Orion, Cassiopeia, Andromeda, and, of course, the Big Dipper and Polaris - the North Star. The Milky Way spreads thickly from horizon to horizon as if flung from a giant seed spreader. I glimpse a shooting star out of the corner of my eye, but before I can shift my gaze it vanishes.

As I take in the night sky, the mast sways back and forth in the foreground. I take out the binoculars to study the sky more closely, but only for a moment. The constant motion makes stargazing with binoculars difficult. Never mind. Even the briefest magnified view of the heavens inspires awe.

Returning my attention to the immediate surroundings, I note that we still seem very alone out here. A watchman is trained first and foremost to follow the ColRegs - the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea. I scan the horizon for lights from other ships and see none. I study the waters immediately ahead for floating or partially submerged objects and see nothing. (It is very dark after all!)

I examine the chart plotter screen. I see one Automated Identification System (AIS) target more than 10 miles north, the sailing yacht Ishbel, a Trintella 47, but this is not unexpected. She and Windleblo have become mid-ocean buddies, as we've paced each other for more than 400 miles over the past three days. We've spoken by VHF radio with the humans aboard her, three Spaniards on a British-flagged vessel headed for Martinique on a NARC (not ARC) voyage. We even got close enough to take photographs of each other under way, exchanging email addresses by radio and promising to send off the photos once we reach Internet.

Tonight, though, Ishbel is well over the horizon, nowhere to be seen, not least because her skipper has the nasty habit of running at night without navigation lights, presumably to save power. This practice has been berated no end by the Windleblo crew.

So it's only me, the boat, the night, and the sea.

I open my senses again. I hear the creaking of the hull as the boat rocks and sways. The wind whistles through the shrouds and spins the whirring wind turbine blades. The sheets slap as they strain to hold the sails. Beyond the deck, whitecaps crest, the sound reaching my ears as a constant whooshing and splooshing, with the occasional hard bang as a wave smacks against the topsides. Phosphorescent sparkles light up the boat's wake, spinning aft with each roll of the boat over an ocean swell. I feel the warm breeze against my neck and smell the salt in the air.

I look up once more. Stars extend to infinity.



Postlude

John's riddle from yesterday was "If I have a bee in my hand, what is in my eye?"

The answer?

Beauty.

(Beauty is in the eye of the "bee" holder, get it?)



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