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Fryderyk - Day 11 & 12 - Nov 30th-Dec 1st, 2022



Day 11 & 12
Date: Nov 30th-Dec 1st, 2022
Position: 19'03,904N; 36'13,440W
Distance to destination: 1450nm

Move along, nothing to see here! Nothing broke today (except for Code Zero pathetically unreliable lines that broke some many times that "broken" is its new "normal" state) so we can just chill and sail. For the first time since we left Las Palmas. Let it be our new "normal".

Since day is slow and laid back it makes it a perfect spot to write a bit about the main star of this show, ocean water! I wrote some bits here and there, but let's wrap it up! First things first, boomer service: water temperature! It's warm, like really warm, during night watch you can feel how it radiates with a heat of the day. In place we are right now which is literally the middle of Atlantic it's something close to 27 Celsius. In Las Palmas it was 25 as far as my memory goes. I can wait to dive in and swim, but that will probably have to wait until we're at St. Lucia.

The color(s): there's no one color of the water here but tons. It all depends on the sun and its position, whether sky is clear or cloudy, with clouds coverage and colors also having an impact, and your position as an observer. So during night it's mostly graphene black, but not always! When bigger wave splashes your boat's stern (where the white position light is located) you can observe its deep bottle green color and white foam topping. But there's more, it's quite sensational and somehow I didn't mention it so far. When we reached warmer sectors of the ocean after sailing for 4-5 days from Las Palmas, water started to glow during night. It's connected to larger volumes of plankton in the water and it looks like a water fireflies. It usually happens when our boat is cutting through a wave with a speed thus making water noisy hence producing this subtle and beautiful light spectacle. But there was one night where I could observe those uncanny lights further away from our boat and they looked like a small electric discharges blasting with aquamarine-yellow lights that were flashing underwater lightning small area around with its halo in a split second. Magic.

During day water "vanilla" color is close to deep topaz blue. You can see through it but the ocen is so deep here (5000m where we are right now) that there's nothing to reflect or change its color with a distance, so no gradients, just high value deep blue. Depending on where the sun is at given moment it can reflect as silver graphite or golden brass, it looks a bit like a liquid metal. At the sunset it's a bit of everything at once as clouds reflect orange sun and mix it with their colors casting long tinted shadows and reflections.

The sound: it's a noisy beast, but a soothing one. Gentle shimmering of collapsing waves goes to a crescendo when meeting our boat just to give us gentle push. And there's additional audio track featuring the wind. If water is a rhythm section, wind is vocals, howling occasionally in a refrain.

The texture: Freckles, freckles, freckles everywhere! It's like looking at organic living fabric made of super dense yet flexible and reactive material. It's more regular on a high level with waves crossing and morphing into each other and super irregular at lower level. When you look carefully at the space between waves that seems "flat" you can see it comprises myriads of tiny freckles that scream "entropy rules!".

The smell: I'm surprised, but I cannot smell it. I mean I sense something, but it's so fragile and insignificant that I cannot give it a proper "name". You can sense salt is everywhere, but salt arguably has no distinctive smell. It's definitely not the "ocean breeze" smell they sell to us in many aroma products. But it could be just me and my recent back-to-smoking episode to blame.

Shame. But not really. There's a time for everything in a life, and having a smoke now, as the sun goes down and I listen to Bon Iver on a fly deck during my watch, gives me great deal of satisfaction and nostalgia. Mastercard has left a chat.


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