116 | How to learn the ocean with your body
Reading time: 9 minutes
WHAT’S HAPPENING NOW
We’re underway from Tuvalu to the Marshall Islands. We’ve just started day 3. This passage will be 9-10 days.
Total distance: 1087 nautical miles
Miles to go: 800
Air temp: Hot hot hot. When we have some cloud cover we rejoice. It’s about 97F/36C with heavy humidity. Everything inside the boat is hot. Things like dishes and the countertops. I get out a bowl for yogurt and the bowl is warm in my hand. The yogurt comes to room temp in about five minutes. I’ve started keeping a few bowls in the freezer. We are lucky conditions have been mild so we can keep the ports and hatches open to catch the breeze down below. If waves were splashing over the boat (totally normal), we’d have to close it up and it would be a sauna down below. We have a lot of fans, especially in our sleeping bunk, and that helps.
Conditions: Moderate winds about 10-16 knots, on the beam. Earlier we had lighter winds and we alternated between motor-sailing and sailing. Now we’ve got these lovely winds and have been sailing steady for the last 24 hours. Seas are friendly. These are fabulous conditions, like nothing we’ve had before.
Listening to: Armchair Expert podcast, the “We are supported by…” episode featuring Samantha Powers.
Reading: “Your Table is Ready,” a memoir of a maitre’d in New York. Lots of drugs, alcohol and sex, plus descriptions of food and eating that make me long to reach the States.
Watching: “Beef” on Netflix. Whatever is the opposite of a binge watcher, that’s me. I still have four episodes to go in this series.
Recent meals: Pasta with a blue cheese sauce, sauteed onions, peas and walnuts. This isn’t exactly a meal for the tropics but we were loving this when we were still in NZ’s winter so this is what I provisioned. Still tastes incredible.
In Funafuti, Tuvalu we met another palangi (white person) who turned out to be the Australian Ambassador. He told us he’d been working in Tuvalu for eighteen months, “through all the COVID stuff.” He said Tuvalu was the last country in the world to get COVID. Which makes it especially ironic that this is where Harry picked up COVID. Neither of us had it yet in spite of our travels. On Monday we cleared into Tuvalu with administrative people, some of whom had sniffles and coughs, and Harry showed symptoms on Thursday. An eye infection, a sore throat and a deep, phlegmy cough. We had no idea this might be COVID. Honestly we’d stopped worrying about it. But it hit him so hard, I couldn’t imagine this was just a cold. So we did a home COVID test on Sunday morning before we left Tuvalu: negative. But he’s continued to feel like shit with this heavy chest cough so we did another test today: positive. I have no symptoms at all. I’m so glad we’ve both had all the vaccine and booster shots. Harry’s managing ok but he feels horrible. He’s still doing his captain duties. I’m sleeping like a rock and feeling somewhat heroic. We’ll be fine.
HOW TO LEARN THE OCEAN WITH YOUR BODY
There are a couple of ways to learn the ocean. You could learn with your head: Read Moby Dick. Talk to an oceanographer. Watch The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou starring Bill Murray. You can learn the ocean this way. But this is similar to learning love by reading Shakespeare. It’ll get you part way there, but if you’re not learning in your body, you’re not really learning it.
It’s important to note that we’re not “knowing” the ocean. We’re learning her, which suggests ongoing education. This isn’t a one-and-done situation. We can never know the ocean, a state which suggests a finite amount of information, an end to the learning. This isn’t possible with the ocean. She is unknowable because she is always changing. But we can learn her.
Here’s some suggestions for doing that:
Get in the ocean.
Wherever there is an ocean and you find yourself on her shores, get in. Walk on her sharp, cutting rocks. Step on the softest sand. Feel how your feet greet the water. Your toes might curl in the cold, your arches might relax and sink into the shallows in the heat.
Walk out into some depth, maybe just above your knees. Take a few more steps and feel the ocean support your weight. If you’re on a beach with waves, feel how she pulls you out then pushes you back in, Dr. Dolittle’s Push-Me-Pull-You in real life. So insistent. Sink into her. Up to your neck. Move your hands and arms through the water and feel the special silk of her salt across your skin. Keep moving your hands and arms through the water and notice the turbulence you create. A tiny typhoon.
When you’re ready, slip beneath the surface. Be seaweed and sway with the pull of the waves. When your head breaks the surface again you can smell the salt before you taste it. Taste the ocean on your lips. Wonder to yourself, “why is the ocean salty?” What does she need with all this salt? She has different levels of saltiness in different parts of the world. Some places she’s dense with it and you’ll find yourself more floaty. Other places the salt is barely a hint. But everywhere, salty.
As often as possible, put your body in the ocean. Get in when the winds are high and her surface is stippled with rain drops. If you want to learn all parts of her you’ll have to do this. Watch her shift from calm to chaos while you perch on a slippery rock. Listen to her pound the shore around you. Listen for the echo of her.
With your body in the ocean you are connected to the other side of the world. From here to there, thousands of miles but you’re touching Indonesia from the shores of Oregon. The ocean is magic like that.
Live on the ocean.
This one is harder. You’ll need a sturdy vessel, preferably a sailboat. This is also helpful so you can do the next step, “See as much of her as you can.” When you live on the ocean you don’t get a break from her. If you’re tired of her frenzy, too bad. If she’s making you sick and you can’t get any sleep, too bad. If she’s showing you her fury and you’re afraid, all you can do is hang on and wait her out. This is the reassuring thing about the ocean; she is always temporary in her moods. Everything she throws at you will pass eventually.
Living on the ocean is a lesson in being where your feet are. The ocean demands so much attention from you it’s impossible to be anywhere, mentally, except in her embrace. Even when she’s placid, a calm and peaceful undulating friend, she holds your attention. You can’t look across her expanse without marveling at her infinite, deep beauty.
If you can live on her she’ll throw you around. Be assured of that. You’ll get bruised. Angry. All your muscles will be sore from resisting her shoves. She has the worst sense of timing and no respect for you using the toilet. Sometimes, if you have to be on the deck of your sailboat instead of in the safety of the cockpit, she’ll act like she’d like you to join her. She’ll pitch the boat and throw it this way and that while you hang on. She is a wild dog shaking its prey to death.
Other times she’s soft and gentle and rocks you to sleep like you’re her baby. She is peaceful. Content to flow gently under your keel like a sleep-walking belly dancer. In these moments it’s hard to imagine her any other way. But this is why you need to live on her to learn her. So you can see her in all her moods.
See as much of her as you can.
As constant as she is, the ocean is never the same. This one beach will be different as the seasons pass, different from one day to the next. It might feel impossible to learn every part of the ocean. There is so, so much of her. The wildness of the California coast, the ease of the Caribbean. Try anyway.
Stand on the western shore of New Zealand, on the South Island. Face the Tasman Sea, known for its volatile, ferocious conditions. Watch the jumble and tumble of big waves seeking refuge on shore. It’s as if she’s trying to get a break from herself, flinging parts onto land. Consider her mood before walking into the Tasman Sea. Maybe just to your knees. Feel her pull on your body, a strength not found on the shore at Tahiti.
Travel several thousand miles across her changeable surface and note her sense of responsibility so far from land. She controls the weather on the entire planet. This is a big job. She takes it seriously. She’s indifferent to your presence. She’s not personal. She’s too professional for that. But as long as she’s there and you are too, you can learn from her. Don’t let this opportunity pass. Fall in love.
WHAT’S NEXT
More ocean learning for us. What’s it like to have COVID on the seas? I’m grateful this passage has so far been easy and gentle with no major mishaps*.
I’ll be doing a load of laundry in our miniature washing machine today, plus making a new batch of yogurt. I’m thinking about making pizza for dinner and that’ll take considerable energy. It’ll also heat the cabin even more, but it’ll be worth it for big bites of bready, cheesy delicious.
Love forever,
Joy
*One mishap, mostly minor but a little bit major: Within five minutes of hoisting the Code Zero sail, the tissue-paper one we use in lightest winds, the halyard (the line that hauls one end of the sail to the top of the mast) chafed through. The sail came down in the water like a floof. This exact thing happened on our passage from Mexico to French Polynesia. We haven’t used the sail until now, because we haven’t really had light enough winds. When we get to the Marshall Islands Harry will go up the mast to investigate how this could have happened so fast. Is there a razor lining the hole where the halyard exits the mast? A Gremlin holding a pair of scissors? In the meantime we don’t have a light-winds sail but we’re doing fine with the Genoa, which is a little heavier like khaki pants.