Time has a way of unraveling on this boat. A 6-hour watch every 18 hours means dawn, evening, afternoon, then morning flow by in rapid succession. Sunset is our brightest, most collective event, and every day it happens at a different point in my changing sleep cycle. An early morning sunset is a wonderful firestarter of optimism and deep peacefulness.
The wandering time reminds me of the electronic clock in my Stanford dorm, which we were too lazy to set and would instead try to plug into the wall at precisely noon or midnight. When we inevitably missed the mark, we would be stuck with operations like ‘add 2 hours 37 minutes to the clock’ that my friends and I became quite good at adapting to. One note is that our compass and most circles contain 360 degrees of precision, yet the watches we all wear have 60 × 24 = 1440 points. Even lost at sea searching for tiny islands among vast water, we care more about keeping our schedule than where we’re headed. Perhaps it reflects a good practice of concentrating more on the present than the future.
Yesterday B-watch had morning watch with chores, and then our field day deep clean of the whole boat an hour after we got off. During the field day pump-up, we started strong by throwing all our water at C-watch in the water-drinking relay race and arriving first place. Then we helped A-watch move gear out of the kitchen, helped C-watch move cushions out of the saloon, cleaned the fore and mid belowdecks exhaustively with enough time to help A and C watches move items back, all in our typical high spirits. Afterwards, the crew pulled out the very high pressure emergency fire hoses and we battled the saltwater for a long time, then tended to our wounds with soap and shampoo. I’m cleaner than I’ve been in a long time, and my hair is magically soft thanks to Barry’s miracle spray. After, a beautiful cloudy sunset waned into a classic yellow-blue sky, then a huge vertical mass of purple appeared above a large cloud. I’ve never seen a sky like it.
My fellow sailors and I have been having a great time. B-watch completed our second challenge where we start with an oreo on our foreheads and have to get it into our mouth. I took first place quite easily with the microshake strategy; Bisby is quite hilarious to watch with the open mouth cheek gulping method, while Bonk sticks to raising and lowering her eyebrows. The early finishers took new roles as sports analysts and commentated the various advantages and drawbacks of the competitors’ facial structures. Buffy’s been carving eyebrow slits and Barry has been handing out haircuts. Bisby and I just came to a deal after a long negotiation period that she will draw me a butterfly Lorenz manifold as well as paint my shoes in exchange for a loan of Bluets by Maggie Nelson. Sophia and I exchanged some insights into her journal for a discussion of Kierkegaard’s Seducer’s Dairy that I recently read. I decisively beat Baclava, our visiting French master’s student, in chess, and drew her scene of a whale underwater which I have never seen before, while she drew a redwood tree, something she had never heard of. Just this morning I showed our professor Barb a photo of the tiny 2-inch fish my brothers and I would catch in the concrete lake back home, which pales in imagination to the 11-foot blue marlin we caught, tagged, and released in Nuku Hiva. A tiny bit of drinking and much more laughing with islanders on Nuku Hiva, playing volleyball and basketball with kids on Manga Reva who were amazed by my dribbling and dunking. Despite living on a small island for their whole lives, they had much more travelling experience than I. Olin and I reminisced over the good old days in our Trancos dorm with our friends; Bug and I have been orchestrating chaos such as interrupting science class with our arm wrestling bracket leading to two TAs lying deadlocked on the floor with the whole ship’s company cheering them on.
Life has been great in a countless number of forms. I sent my finest postcard to Aki from the Manga Reva post office, and I’m on the hunt for a pearl befitting my mom. Standing lookout on the bow of the boat doing no-hands challenge and squats through perilous waves, beautiful views on all sides including yellow and blue tuna swimming alongside on the boat’s wake, deep sleep rocking up down side side, drawing watercolors under the tutelage of the highly skilled bohemian in the galley, Jake. Good jokes in bad taste, uncontrolled laughs and smiles flowing freely in the wind, the raw delight of spraying close friends close in the face while we scrub the deck. It’s as great an adventure as all the others.
My current album of choice is Zach Bryan’s self-titled; the opus is I Remember Everything and the prettiest line is: ‘you’re like concrete feet in the summer heat / it burns like hell when two souls meet’. Favorite recent reading is Hemingway’s Fifty Grand, which has a similar plot to the movie Creed which is the latest movie I’ve liked recently, watched on the plane to Tahiti. My biggest non-regret is missing out on 500,000 dollars to our fancy AI startup by being at sea. My only want is that everyone I’m away from is doing well and enjoying life.
Sincerely,
Blue
