24 hours- 160.9 NM
Our biggest day so far!
We bake bread!
Last night, the rock and roll, big-jumble swell came back in force--but it didn't bug us.
When Hunter can't sleep, she simply puts on her night gear (rain pants, jacket, harness, headlamp, PFD, Nook, mug of hot cocoa, 2 chocolate cookies...) and joins me. We wait for the dolphin to come and visit and dampen our hair in a light rain shower, counting the flying fish that land on our deck. We snuggle and laugh about all the funny things happening in her book. Talk about the Marquesas and what it means to have been "colonized" and why it is called French Polynesia. She wants to know all about breadfruit and how we will eat it when we find it there. She asks me if she can go to theater school in London and study acting because she wants to be "serious" actress someday and tells me she also hopes she can work as a check-out girl in a grocery store ... I tell her how fortunate this is, because those two professions will go hand-in-hand.
When I can't sleep on my off watch, I trust I will have a really great sleep the next time.
I lie awake, appreciating how hard Pura Vida is working in the swell.
I pat her bulkhead and tell her I love her.
Accepting that the good/bad moments are as endless and unpredictable as the waves...THIS is the trick.
We have put our expectations in an empty bottle of red wine... and thrown it into the sea.
In a rolling galley, I baked bread in the 90* degree heat and staggering humidity-and when the yeast wouldn't activate and we realized that the new, fresh, yeast brought down to us by Grandma Sara, was stashed under the bunk where our good Captain was sleeping- we let it be.
A good crew would never want to wake any soul from a worthy doze, so we made soda bread.
Hard as a curling stone it was, but at Sea, we accept destiny with salty resolve-and smear it in plenty of butter.
Which brings us to the ITCZ...
At the moment, it looks as if the Zone has swelled to an epic proportion and we may very well be facing a stint in doldrum purgatory-no matter what we plot or try. We have been steering our course (since Cabo) to arrive exactly where it looked smallest but it seems, the equatorial gods are playing the shell-game with the band and everywhere you think it was or will be-it's not. Oh well. The weather does as it will, predictions made over more than a few days out (especially in volatile areas) are never very accurate.
We may get lucky or we may get pasted--who knows?
As long as we smear it in plenty of butter--I'm sure we'll be fine.
Kai's depressing fact:
More than 3.5 billion people depend on the ocean for their primary source of food. In 20 years, this number could double to 7 billion.
If this is true, by the time I am 31 years old...there will be a barren ocean and a lot of hungry and unhealthy people.
If things keep going the way they are now and we don't make changes about how we fish and what we fish for...this will become every nation's biggest problem.
How will they feed their people?
Hunter's hints:
One day when you go to the beach and you see anything that's plastic and not biodegradable, take it home with you and recycle it. If we do something good for the ocean every day, it will help. People used to think it was okay to kill whales and we almost made a lot of them extinct but we have learned that we cant do this and made people educated that you don`t eat whales or use products made form whales and now many species are starting to bounce back.
Well, the same thing is happening to fish and coral reefs and turtles so we have to do the right thing like we did with whales. We need to make sure we protect them so they will go on and on and be part of our planet for ever. Many of our lives depend on the sea so we need to protect it. We should stop mindlessly killing fish because we do need them. It is okay to eat them but we have to be responsible and not overfish and pollute. We can make it better, like we did with the whales and cleaning up our air and making human rights and stuff so we can do it with the ocean too.
To my friends on Bowen, try snorkeling this summer and tell me what you see around the island. The best places to see baby fish (juvenile) are in the rocks near the shore.
At first you may not see many fish because it takes awhile to notice things underwater but the more you do it, the more you will find things you did not see the first time. PS. I miss you guys!
And a PS from MOM- I just type. They say all this stuff.
Sylvia Earle talks about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and the connectedness of our largely land-based lives with the sea:
All in a hot and copper sky,
ReplyDeleteThe bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
Um, sent in the hope of forestalling this!
Dear Kai ... Very depressing facts, indeed. The number of humans on the planet has more than tripled in my lifetime and virtually all of our huge problems are linked to this growth. Unless we can voluntarily control the situation the earth will do it for us ... but it helps to remember that what is happening is not really anyone's fault, we simply have to learn to manage our success as a species. Of course, our propensity for violence toward each other and our ignorant tribalism is another matter altogether and may, alas, prove larger than the difficulties caused by overpopulation. Love,
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