Leaving Luderitz . Leaving those months trapped by the needs of the ship. And its dry and bright days, its long dock of tilted wood, the dusty streets and the repeated faces of the town. Lifting anchor after two failed cast off, after seeing several sailboats move away towards the west while we continued searching for the invisible, dismantling our boat to the unthinkable.
We completed the procedures to leave the territory and stayed one more day, under the look between surprised and suspicious of the immigration lady. I assured her that this time we were setting sail. Diego was on another boat, doing an oil change, we could not say no to a job. But the next day, we got up before sunrise, and we felt that the departure was real. The boat was ready, so was its crew. My companion and I, in silence, were preparing the last details. The morning looked warm, the breeze was soft but constant. Slowly we pulled the stern anchor out of the mud. It was not the first time we did the maneuver. And Diego's voice announced: FREE! That word has never been so well used. Free to set sail, to go to the sea, to surrender to the ocean, to set sails and go with the breeze, far from the land and its noises and its rhythmic time. Oiuna announced to Port Control our departure, and I could hear Evaldyn, the control tower agent, answer “I love you my baby, my youngest sailor in the sea”.
Two playful seals accompanied us for a stretch, while we raised the sails. The desert was lost in the mist and the ocean opened up, luminous. There were Diego's arms, and the sound of the sea, the swinging of “Tortuga”, well fixed in the water. The noise receded, time slowed down. Finally. Finally, we set sail.
On the first night, the GPS stopped working, right in the area where a friend had also lost all connection a month before. The next day, with a simple touch, it worked again. We were left thinking that perhaps it had not been any fix but the signal came back. Nobody mentions that there are spaces without signal in the sea, and yet... Our autopilot also stopped working, but in a more definitive way. We installed our wind vane, “Dimitri”, made by us in Greece. In Luderitz I had made an extra sail and it worked very well. As with all wind pilots, we have to reduce the sail a little so that it can carry us well, or set up the spinnaker. It has a somewhat curved course, some would say that it was capricious, but the truth is that the ship went well.
The wind was soft, that second day, soft but constant and well bearing. The sea was beautiful. A humpback whale appeared, Mae saw it. Very close to the boat, bigger than the boat, its large gray body, slow, regular. You could only hear the noise of the water expelled from its body, its breathing. Behind that peaceful large body I felt a different world, with other times and references. It is fascinating, feeling it so close, immutable, almost eternal. Moved, I remembered a sentence of Melville "When the sea is moderately calm, and slightly marked with spherical ripples, and this gnomon- like fin stands up and casts shadows upon the wrinkled surface, it may well be supposed that the watery circle surrounding it somewhat resembles a dial, with its style and wavy hour-lines graved on it. On that Ahaz-dial the shadow often goes back."
The albatrosses accompanied the ship, along with some large black birds, and other very small ones, black and white. After a few days, the large birds disappeared. But the small ones, the “petrels” continued to appear in the waters. These birds look like a little plane, their wings hardly move.
The navigation was marked by several days of calm sea and strong wind, alternating with a few days of more formed and crossed sea, with waves from the south, and always strong. One morning the four of us were looking at the sea. “It drives me crazy,” said Mae, “How do waves pass through the void?” I thought that we did not see the same thing when we looked at the sea. Mae poses a scientific gaze on it, while mine is essentially poetic. But we have all learned a little to read the signs of change in its waters.
I see the four of us, hours immersed in our readings and then sharing them. And the sea to infinity. I thought we were alone, deliciously alone and far from all the useless bustle. But I realized that it was not entirely true. We were accompanied by writers, who fed our thoughts and imagination. Sometimes an encyclopedia, other times a poem or a fictional novel. The most exquisite of our humanity kept with us.
On board there was an atmosphere of almost divine harmony. When the sea calmed down, in the cockpit, we chatted and laughed, we remembered past sailings, we read extracts that we liked, to each other. When the sea got rough, we went inside, lying in the beds, and we read, and we read.
Of course, the calm days were a relief and a celebration for everyone. We could then go out, try to fish, sit on the bow, cook normally, put some order on the boat. But I also found its charm in that rough sea that created regularly, with its currents that collide, with the crossed waves from the south, and that resemble a laugh. It reminded me of the rushing waters of the Indian Ocean, even if in the southern Atlantic I found them grayer, or deep blue. A serious color. But so much clicking and so much foam gave it a cheerful air and took it away from its solemnity of the low latitudes. On days with rough sea, the “petrels” were even more graceful and appeared, more numerous. It was searching in a book of Moitessier that I found the name of those birds that continued to accompany us. How wonderful, how they fly without flapping their wings, they glide, dive towards the sea and barely touch it with the tip of a wing. Where will they sleep? We were hundreds of miles from land. Another similar bird also appeared in its flight. But it was all black, only with a white circle around the eye. It is true that that sea crossed with waves from the south was hard, but its imposing and changing beauty dazzled.
There were incidents during that navigation. The spinnaker broke, due to our mistake . We were so comfortable with that big front sail set, that we decided to leave it, even if we felt that the wind had increased . It probably reached about twenty knots and some stronger gusts that others tore it . We also had a lower shroud broken. One day when the sea was a little rough, we heard the noise from inside. Diego then placed a rope in its place, and we gave up using the mainsail for the rest of the navigation. Without main sail, without spinnaker and without autopilot, we continued our course with the genoa. We had another older spinnaker but the wind was too strong to be able to use it. But the mood on board was good, there was like a wave of confidence, an unalterable lightness. Only sometimes, on my nights on duty, I thought about the few millimeters of aluminum that separated me from that abyss, about the immensity of water that surrounded us and then I would get vertigo. And so the ship went, sometimes heading northwest, to times southwest, Dimitri, the little wind vane, carried under the tireless trade winds that never stopped blowing.
In our navigations through the Indian Ocean we had been accompanied by pilot fish, striped fish, which go day and night with the ship for hundreds of miles. A real company. I used to go see them, at least once a day, and if I did not found them in the bow, they were in the stern. But on this trip, the pilot fish were conspicuous by their absence. We were able to observe, however, some very small and white jellyfish, with a small sail that stuck out of the water. They were not like the Portuguese skulls and we could not identify them. Sometimes a small squid or a flying fish would fall on the deck, always to the great satisfaction of the cat.
There was a change in the wind, around the day tenth. It had decreased, and in the sky the clouds had changed, fluffier and fatter. The sea was so calm that we dared to take out our second spinnaker, a smaller spinnaker that had given as a gift by a friend years ago. The first day of the spinnaker was a joy, so much more comfortable than the genoa alone. At night we took it out, and the next morning, despite the calm sea, we had a lot of difficulty installing it. It broke a little but we left it on, and the sea does not forgive those mistakes. In the evening, when we were already thinking about taking it out, we saw it tear, literally split in two, even though the wind did not exceed 10 knots. It hurt, seeing it like that. And we returned to our unstable genoa, always deprived of the most.
The rest of the trade winds barely lasted two days and they blew again with the same force as before. They are fascinating, those tireless winds. Despite the hectic sailing, we decided to throw a bottle into the sea, passing the 0 meridian. We stayed dreaming. What trip will it take? What will it be like, being a message in a bottle? What will it be like, traveling in a bottle? We made drawings, we wrote our contact. “We are creating a treasure” Mae commented. “It is not yet a treasure, but if someone finds it, then it will be”. What will it be like, finding a bottle, with a message inside? Pure joy, throwing that bottle into the sea.
There was a change in the sea, about 150 miles from St Helena. More flying fish, and some bream that swam close to the hull. One night, Mae caught a 20 kilo tuna. It was almost an hour of fighting, releasing lines and taking, tiring the fish. At one point Mae asked me to turn on the engine to tire the fish more and the engine gave me an oil alarm: there was a problem with the filter and we didn't have a replacement filter. That's how we discovered that we would have to get to St. Helena without engine.
After winning her fierce fight with the fish, and spending a good part of the night working on it, Mae began to deliver me outrageous quantities of fish. And life began to revolve around the fish.
Breakfast: Fish ceviche.
Lunch: Fish pakora
for snack a little fish cake, and for dinner a fried tuna.
And then? More cake, curry, stir fries, and lots of preserves. Not even the cat could eat more. Incongruous dialogues were heard at the table. “Hey, you talk a lot but you eat little” “I just can't eat cake anymore.” “You guys didn't see me but I ate a lot” “Let's make a plan, one more each one and it's over.”
I was heating milk to make a tuna cake and Diego was closing preserves, when a wave shook us all. We caught the pot and jars on the fly, and we continued the work. “oatmeal its not that bad” Diego murmured, and we were tempted to laugh without being able to stop.
On the penultimate day of sailing, a new bird appeared, larger, with a somewhat long beak. An unmistakable sign that we were (“too much” I couldn’t stop thinking) close to land. When it was my turn to go to sleep that last night on the open sea, I dreamed that I was sailing. In Tortuga, at the tiller, in the middle of the Atlantic and with big wide waves and a blue sea. There was a feeling of plenitude, of happiness, of well-being in the dream, and the sea was as beautiful as when it is beautiful. When I woke up for my watch, still at night, I went out to the cockpit and Diego pointed something out to me. It was the land. The island was a big shadow on that moonlit night. It looked like a big fish sleeping in the rough waters, a big fish, or a whale. I thought that those 15 days had been too short for me. 15 days out of the world. And I felt immense gratitude towards the crew of Tortuga, which is, without any doubt, the best in the world.
There was a lot of wind and we were going too fast. We decided to put down almost all the sail, leaving only a little bit of genoa, slow down, slow down until the sun came up, to approach this land with sunlight, without engine and without mains sail. Ten miles from the port and 4 from the coast, the wind was still blowing hard and there was an hour left until dawn. With the first light some white birds appeared, light, they seemed made of paper. They were the "Fairy tern" (Gigis alba) that we would meet again on the island, curious and confident. It was already dawn when we passed the cape. The wind was regular, not very strong and we release some more genoa. We were heading towards James Town that we could see in the distance, calculating if we could enter, without going too far, since we were without engine. Mae threw the fishing line, and then the wind accelerated. Later, Wonda, the seamstress from St. Helena, told us that many sailors tear their spinnakers on that cape, because the wind accelerates brutally and without warning. While Diego and I tried to reduce sail and communicate with Port Control, Maé caught a 7 kilo yellowfin tuna. Lost phrases were mixed together like “release the sheet!” “Port Control is calling!” “I have a fish, I have a fish!” “The furler sheet is stuck!” “It's a yellow fin tuna! It's big!” “We have to tell them that we're coming without engine!” “I don't want to eat any more tuna!” An absurd scene if there ever was one.
But we reduced the genoa, the gust didn't break anything, Mae took out only one 7 kilo tuna promising that he would sell it and we wouldn't have to eat it (something he couldn't do, because there was plenty of tuna in St. Helena, and the locals could help us only by lending us a freezer so we could take a break before eating more tuna, which it was delicious indeed). And we were able to talk to Port Control, to whom we assured that we were doing well, but they insisted on sending us the "rescue boat" free of charge. It wasn't bad, since a mile from James Town the mountains completely blew out the sails. They towed us to the anchorage, and let us rest after a warm and discreet welcome.
A few hours later, we went ashore. My legs were uncertain, I felt the floor of cotton, the earth had a slight movement, and I had to stop a couple of times, disturbed by that strange dizziness. I felt something strange inside. In front of me, the silence of the island and the birds, the flowers. The desire to explore it, the marvelous and new look at everything. And behind, or inside, I don't know, that sea, its grandeur, its music and its sounds. So immense. It was like returning from another world, grateful to arrive and see that beautiful land and at the same time, strangely, wanting to return to that world of water that I somehow carried inside or of which he was part, inextricably.
Añadir comentario
Comentarios