Surprise Vacation!!

There is nothing wrong with quitting. If it is what your heart truly desires, be it not a failure or a mistake, but a blessing and a reminder that life is an adventure, a journey, and an expedition and that here and there we all must turn back from a dead end.

Home for a little while.

This one is for you Rose.

a) push bike for twenty minutes

b) ride bike for 30 seconds

repeat steps a and b until desired result

results!

I'm going to own one of these one day and sail off into that damn sunset.

I sleep over there under that palm tree.

30 second exposure, 13 billion light years

You, the wind, and the ocean. Thats all you need.

This one is for you mom. It's a picture of me!!

snorkeling

Lionfish

Captain Juan Carlos and his boat that once ran loads of marijuana from Venezuela, before he owned it of course.

Norfolk, VA

Number 8

Container Port

Waterside Marina

Navy Shipyard

Wisconsin

Thursday December 16, 2010

I believe we have crossed or are crossing as I write, the gulf stream. Today began with watch from 4am to 8am and in that time I can say there was a perceivable change in the temperature. Even as the early light began to break, the warmth of the water could be seen in the distant clouds as mirage in the desert. The seas are calm now and of a pallid blue that seems pure and bottomless but the bright, empty sky of last night has solidified into a grey rippled dome and when standing outside, gazing across the gentle waves, I can feel the cool air of the north and west mixing with the warm air of the south and east as it swirls around me and the boat. Its hard to believe only a days travel at 7 knots can cover such a dramatic change in climate, only yesterday the temperature was 24F. Upon first light this morning during watch, Kyle spotted dolphins along the port rail. They played and jumped in the wake of the bow, too many to keep track of and count. I fiddled with my camera, failing to capture a decent shot and amidst my excitement I began to curse myself for loosing touch with the moment in the name of taking, or stealing I should say, a picture of something so grand so that I could make an attempt at keeping it forever. But for the fact, I was hardly in that moment at all. I put down the camera and thought of Brittany. I know she would have liked to have been there, if only just long enough to watch them play in innocent and untouched beauty. I let it go and tried as well to let myself go. The sun was orange and yellow and the ocean, new again.

2pm, the mail sail ripped. The sea had already begun to build to a metallic grey, foaming and reaching for the rails as the boat started swaying in long rolls and the wind hinting at something ferocious and terrible in the air. We quickly got control of the boom but the gaff sailed wildly through the air as shreds of sail ripped away off into the oblivion of sea and sky. Captain called everyone back inside because the gaff was to wild to tame until the wind died down. By 4pm, the sky was black and pink. The bow was plunging head long into the ever rising sea. At 5 the light was dying quickly. My gut was turning and the horror of the sea had its grip on me. After dark, the crew huddled in the galley, curled up with immersion suit packs while the captain stayed at the wheel. The boat felt life it was coasting down a hill, bouncing of wave after wave but continuously falling forward. Time moved on slowly, my hunger was gone and sleep would not come even late into the night. Through the open port door I could hear the last shreds of sail whipping in the wind like gunshots. The air was heavy and it was all I could do to hold the same position. Engine checks continued on schedule but became 20 minute ordeals due to spilling oil and loose tools and equipment. My mind was gripped by the sea; we were alone, our only island, surely sinkable. At some point during the evening a bilge alarm sounded for the forward compartment. A horrible sound, the sound of a fire alarm. The night was long. I dared not look out the window at the hideous black forms flanking and overtaking us. I closed my eyes and braced for collision after collision and the rocking side to side and bow to stern. The waves growled as they passed underneath and the rain began to pour later in the night. One wave in particular crashed onto the boat so hard, I sprang from my position on the floor ready to dive for an immersion suit as the boat tipped to a dangerous angle. Everything shook and the clanging of the drawers and their contents rang about the galley. I glanced up at the window to see the water line straight across the middle of the glass, well over the rail and high enough to gush through the gap in the side hatch. A coast guard chopper flew us by not long after. Our roof mounted EPIRB had been blown away into the ocean and had sent off a distress signal. It was a relief to know that help was not too far away. Later on as I lay sleepless on the galley settee, a wave jolted me out of a half sleep and I looked up through the window above my head to see the moon shining though a break in the clouds for only a few moments until it was gone again and the rain returned, my mind eased and I finally drifted into a short sleep. It has been only 2 nights at sea.

Sunday December 19, 2010

The sea grew overnight with a constant nw swell. But I slept soundly for the first time in days. Dawn was a sad, grey affair from where I sat on watch in the wheelhouse. The suns first light was heralded by a smear of pink on the horizon, the rest of the sky did not seem to notice and carried on in gloom and murkiness. Everyday on the ocean has its own personality, it has its own agenda and one can only gaze upon it as the world carries out its day-to-day affairs, which are indifferent to you and your presence. The weather becomes a tangible element just like the sea and the sky, always there like it is about to speak, but it never does. It only speaks in a feeling that overtakes you, its mood becomes yours and you plod along at the speed of a traffic jam.

driving the boat.

Tuesday December 21, 2010

Winter Solstice. I watched a lunar eclipse at sea early this morning. Such a slow and graceful process, the heavenly bodies in dance and motion, the sunset of every horizon on the globe cast upon our dear neighbor in a blaze of orange. The sky seemed electric, full of magic and superstition and there was no one but me to be delighted and charmed. I stood on the aft deck, above the groan and rumble of the engine, silent myself, pondering the alignment and the perfection. I may have been the only person on earth to have seen it, and for all it mattered under my dome of sparkling stars and vacant soundless clouds, beneath which was spread the black abyss of sea, I was.

Thursday December 23, 2010

Arrival Culebra. I awoke to a splendid silence. A blackness, sweat and hot and thick; heavy like rain so I couldn’t fall back asleep. But the silence… Pure. Unmolested, resolute. Ahh. Above deck the sun had long begun its assault but the morning was fresh and somehow different than the mornings had been at sea. I studied my new surroundings critical at first, weighing what I saw against what I had expected, then relieved, settled, like a dream, infallible. I had made it. I had arrived by the most tedious, uncomfortable means to this blip on the map. This corner of the world which I had dreamed and pondered and wondered about for so long. And here I find there is a thing in the air, a sound if you will, a whisper, a soft murmur that caresses the eardrum and speaks to the soul. But single this sound out you cannot. It is there but not there at all if you stop to listen to it. You can make out all the sounds and hear them one at a time. The waves lapping against the boat… the lively music drifting across the water… the orchestra of insects buzzing in the trees… the dog barking and the distant human voices, inaudible but so warm and inviting. But you can still not hear it, the island, the soul of the island, its magic. It speaks to a deeper self yet you can almost make it out as it crosses the wind and spirals above and below you, its sweet melody filling your heart. You are in the right place.

Saturday December 25, 2010

Christmas. My favorite gift today was the sunrise.

Wanderbird tied up in Red Hook, New York outside a Heineken distribution center and recycling center. They let us use one of the empty bay doors one rainy day to do some painting. Inside there were blocks of crushed aluminum cans the size of small cars stacked to the roof. Standing in the raw wind blowing rain in from the storm as we lay coats of two part epoxy paint onto some boat trim, I was reminded of an article I once read.

From Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things, by John C. Ryan and Alan Thein Durning, copyright 1997 Northwest Environment Watch, Seattle

Americans drink more water carbonated in soda than they drink plain from the tap. The world drinks about 70 million gallons of soda every day. Following are the resources used to get you that can of pop.

The cola contained high-fructose corn syrup from Iowa, a state where even the rain usually contains traces of pesticides. A milling plant used water, enzymes, acids, heat, grinders, and centrifuges to turn corn kernels into starch and then corn syrup. Making syrup is the second largest use of corn in North America; feeding livestock is the largest. On average, Americans consume 48 pounds of corn syrup a year.

To make your cola, the bottling plant combined corn syrup, citric acid, and flavor concentrate (a secret recipe containing flavors, preservatives, caffeine, and artificial coloring) first with water and then with carbon dioxide. The same corn-milling plant in Iowa fermented corn to make the carbon dioxide. The caffeine was a by-product of making decaffeinated coffee.

Your last cola was in an aluminum can weighing 15 grams (about half an ounce). Five grams was recycled from melted-down cans and scrap. The other 10 grams began as 40 grams of bauxite ore in the Australian outback. Massive machines with 15-foot- high tires and shovels big enough to scoop up a car, strip-mined the ore from a thin layer of underground rock. Bauxite mining destroys more surface area than mining of any other ore.

Near the mine, the bauxite was crushed, washed, dried, pulverized, mixed with caustic soda from California, heated, pressurized, settled, filtered, and roasted with calcium oxide from Japan. Forty grams of bauxite yielded 20 grams of the aluminum oxide powder known as alumina, which looks like wet sugar crystals. Most of the caustic soda was captured for reuse. The process also created 16 grams of “red mud”, a skin-burning mixture of oxidized metals and other contaminants. Pipes siphoned the mud to a settling pond, where a fraction of it leached into groundwater. (Remember the recent disaster in Hungary where a similar settling pond at an aluminum factory was breeched?)

A Korean freighter hauled the alumina across the Pacific Ocean to the wall of breakers at the Columbia River bar, the four-mile-wide river mouth that Lewis and Clark called “that seven-shouldered horror.” The ship’s captain used sonar and satellite linkups to plot his course through the bar’s chaotic waves and shifting sands. He motored between the two-mile-long jetties. He entered the deep channel dredged into the Columbia’s shallow estuary by the Army Corps of Engineers. Jetties, dikes, and dredges have washed away or filled in two-thirds of the river’s tidal marshes. Tidal marshes and other estuary habitats are nurse beds for aquatic life, sheltering young fish, birds, and many other animals. Despite all the electronic gadgetry and all the effort to tame the river, the bar--where the misnamed Pacific Ocean and the biggest river on the west coast of the Americas pound against each other--remained the most dangerous part of the freighter’s 24-day journey. Once past the entrance, it was smooth sailing upriver toward the aluminum smelter in eastern Washington.

The smelter dissolved the aluminum oxide in giant steel pots filled with a bath of cryolite (sodium aluminum fluoride). Carbon electrodes (made from Alaskan petroleum)were lowered into the pots and delivered a massive 100,000-amp jolt of electricity. The powerful charge broke oxygen atoms away from the aluminum and attached them to the carbon, forming carbon dioxide. Small amounts of fluorine attached to the carbon and escaped the smelter in the form of perfluorocarbons (PFCs)-greenhouse gases that trap thousands of times more heat per molecule than carbon dioxide. Few processes are as damaging to the global climate as aluminum smelting.

The smelter ran on purchased hydropower 24 hours a day. The smelter bought the electricity at discount rates from the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), the Pacific Northwest’s main provider of electricity. BPA markets power from 29 federal dams and a nuclear power plant. Eight of these dams along the main stems of the Columbia and Snake Rivers annually kill millions of young salmon heading to the Pacific. Dams, damaged stream habitats, hatcheries, and overfishing have eliminated more than 97 percent of wild salmon in the Columbia Basin.

Aluminum smelters use almost one-fifth of the electricity sold by BPA, but the eight aluminum smelters in Oregon and Washington provide only about 7,500 jobs--one-tenth of 1 percent of the regional total. The same smelters drink up to 16 percent of all electricity used in the two states-more than the million residents of Portland and Seattle combined. The average household served by BPA pays about $2 per month extra to subsidize the smelters.

The smelters’ end products--giant slabs, or ingots, of aluminum--were trucked to the Seattle area. There, a mill pressed each thick ingot into a thin rolled sheet of aluminum. Then, at another factory, a high-powered press punched cups resembling tuna cans out of the aluminum sheet. Other machines stretched your can out to its final height, trimmed its edge, printed its colorful design, and applied a clear protective varnish. Ovens baked the can twice, once to dry the printing and once to cure a synthetic coating sprayed on the inside of the can. At the bottling plant, machines filled the can with near-freezing soda and immediately crimped the top on. The can cost more than the soda inside. If you threw your cola can into a recycling bin, it was one of 100 billion beverage cans used each year in the United States; 40 billon are tossed into landfills, and 60 billion are recycled. Your can was later trucked to a recycling center, shredded, and melted down. Within two months of being tossed, it reappeared as a new can. Recycling the can took 5 percent of the energy required to mine and smelt a fresh one.

The East Coast

The sea is at its best at London, at midnight, when you are within the arms of a capacious chair, before a fire, selecting phases of the voyages you will never make. It is wiser not to try to realize your dreams. There are no real dreams. For as to the sea itself, love it you cannot. Why should you? I will never believe again the sea was ever loved by anyone whose life was married to it. It is the creation of Omnipotence, which is not of human kind and understandable, and so the springs of its behavior are hidden. The sea does not assume its royal blue to please you. Its brute and dark desolation is not raised to overwhelm you; you disappear then because you happen to be there. It carries the lucky foolish to fortune and drags the calculating wise to the strewn bones. What else may we expect from it, the nameless thing, new-born with each dawn, but as old as the night? Now for me it had degenerated into its mood of old night, behaving as it did in the lightless days, before poetry came to change it with flattery. It was again as inhuman as when the poet was merely a wonderfully potential blob on a warm mud bank. – H.M. Tomlinson

This is how she came to me. Black and white and slightly sagging in brown waters and from here we embarked on an adventure of untold beauty and despair.

Home. Waves as big as trucks pound the hull only inches from my sleeping head.

Hey mang!! My name is Paulo!! I was born a street dog in Puerto Rico, but then the Humane Society took me and now I live on a boat mang!!

The pay is a full belly and the rare stolen moments of bliss and awe when the world appears under a new light, found in a new place where mother nature is always furious.

Being at sea is a constant reminder of the impermanence of our lives for you can never know if it is you that is moving or if it is the water. Without terra firma, how can you really know where you are, where you are going and from where you have come when all horizons appear as one, the ocean confused and the sky refusing to offer reference. The sea does not care for longevity or endurance, a rudder can only work if there is water passing by it, waves are mountains that rise up, peak, and then wash away. Such is life. Newport, Rhode Island

There once was a little wave rolling along over the ocean. Under crystal skies, though windy storms and beneath starry skies that defy description the little wave rolled on and on. The little wave loved his life and loved his world, he loved his home where the ocean meets sky. One day the little wave saw land on the horizon. He saw a beach and saw that there was nothing he could do and would soon wash up onto the sand and it would be the end of him. He cried to a bigger wave next to him “what am I going to do?!? Please help me, I don’t want this to be the end.” The big wave smiled down at the little wave and said “worry not little one, for you are not just a little wave rolling along over the ocean, you are the ocean.”

Brittany has gone home and New York is far too big to ever know completely. This footbridge encouraged me to follow my soul as if my soul wrote this and was waiting at the other end, impatiently smoking a cigarette wondering if I would actually come. But I took it for a deeper meaning and dug my shoulders into my work a little harder. Thanksgiving.

I find it a paradox that someone so afraid of the world as me finds it so irresistible to run out and get lost in it.

It is better to surrender thought and reason and find yourself not asking your self why you are here and why you have come, but asking yourself where do you want to go next?

Ground Zero. Not sure how I feel about that one.

If we were to make contact with another race of beings from another planet and they were to come visit earth, would we as a human race bring them to New York, the greatest city in the world, and say “This is it! This is the best that we have thought of so far!” Would we show them all the perverse and excessive desires of man and our obsessions and greeds and their manifestation as temples that flash and rise ever higher into the sky? Would we take them to the federal reserve bank and show them the mountains of gold that we hoard and worship above every other god we have loved? Would we show them the two holes in the ground where mankind slaughtered mankind? Would we show them our power over mother nature to decimate her and wound her and cage her, to void her? Would we show them the greatest city in the world and say we are proud of our capitalism, we are boastful of our riches, we are progress, we are methodic, we are unstoppable? No, I should hope not.

Thursday December 9, 2010

This morning we landed on the moon. I rolled out of my hammock in time to see a dead fish wash across the deck. The empty, lifeless, grey landscape tapped at the galley window with drops of water streaking down the glass. We have made a heading back to Virginia. Oh what bad news for morning, this was the last thing I wanted to hear. To revisit, to return to where I have come. To silence the engines for a few days while the weather passes. Karen cut up the fish and put it in a bowl for the dogs. No one else came to the funeral.

Living at sea is a constant physical challenge. Simple things like eating, getting in and out of bed and using the bathroom become strenuous exercises in balance and patience. I’ve never felt so completely exhausted. I attempted to clean and organize my bunk today but could do no more than move my extra sleeping bags (crew quarters have become too warm from the deafening engines for really any blankets at all) and remove a couple pieces of trash. I set up my hammock last night after my watch was over. I find it much easier to relax as I sway with the movement of the boat instead of sliding and bouncing on the air mattress. I looked out over the sea today and imagined looking out over a grassy plain. I could see rain showers in the distance and sunbeams shooting down through the clouds. It made me miss land but made me feel blessed to have known both rolling plain and wide open sea.

I watched dolphins swim along side the boat under the crescent moon with the stars in chorus and the distant ships on the horizon. Its been 5 days. Only 5 days at sea.