The past decade saw me spending over 300 days sailing at sea alone, however the time spent at anchorage with myself, would account to years. During an interview in 2016, I was urged to define “to be alone”, or aloneness, and to that I faithfully claimed being the absence of human influence, rather than in the absence of humans. At sea, lost in an “ocean”…
DAY 9 – Sunday, September 24th Started making good use of the sat-phone. Some revealing information from Bob MacDavitt’s WeatherGram. ITCZ is much lower than normal, which answers the abnormal head winds experienced and abnormally high amount of rain spells. On sat-phone’s Saildocs, I also found a little trick to get information on currents, which will allow us to be sitting on the South Equatorial…
DAY 2 – Saturday, September 16th Fluky winds prevailed through the night and exhaustion slowly caught up with me to an out-cold collapse at 4 am. In what it seemed like 10 minutes, I was once again awake except 4 hours later, to a familiar buzzing sound, dangerously too close: Ship! A clumsy dash to the cockpit, still half asleep, revealed a freighter some 4…
Friday, the only day a sailor should never leave port, along with a boat’s name that should never be changed from its original launch day. Stories of catastrophes are countless, and through personal experience in the Pelican voyage, the subjectivity of superstitions is a real fact. I question how many of these abstract concepts, are active in our lives. How many of these traditions, gifted…
Hard to believe it is already mid September, exactly 364 days from the departure from England. When I flew out of NZ this May, I thought arrival back home would be sometime around September. It’s been more complicated than I visioned. The heat this year has been stuppendous. The passages from Sint Maarten and from Aruba were by far the most uncomfortable ones to my…