Offshore Musing

Musing...

During my night watch a few nights ago, as I sat in the cockpit with my head lolling off the side looking at the splashes of fosphoressence (ahhh a word auto correct can't help me with) like flashes of lightning with every crash of the bow, I began to muse about this whole offshore sailing thing.
      Only, perhaps, backpacking deep into the mountains off the trails have I ever experienced such time travel.  Sure we have our gadgets out here that tell us where we are and even let us send out emails and blog posts like this but really at its essence we are the same as the first sailors.  The ocean view looks identical to me as it did for Columbus, that splash of color deep in the night he also mused over.
      We still trudge along at just a little bit faster than Karl Busby walks (look him up on Facebook for an interesting guy).  When we are really moving and feel like speed demons we are still moving slower than I sometimes used to ride my bicycle on my way to Alaska.
      We do see occasional garbage, a water bottle here or floating hunk of something, but not very often, at least in this part of the world.  The wind still moves us at its own whims.  We set waypoints that the wind and sea completely ignore, (how dare they!)  so we must be content to miss them by miles or start up the engine and do what humans everywhere do, force nature to their will, but we don't, we fall off and sail on.
      Every few days the Sea gets an attitude and starts to swat us around, reminding us that we are just a little cork in a washing machine making our way only by her grace and permission.  Often the very next morning we awaken to a stunning light show as the sun comes up over the water and there might not be a wave in sight.
     Aquatic dwellers surface occasionally to say "Hi!"  In the case of dolphins or even whales or just to do their thing and we happened to be in the right place to see them do it.  Just as we left St Thomas whales went by and acted like we were not even there... Just feeding like cows in a Wyoming meadow.
     We are planning the next HUGE stage of our voyage and were faced with three options, the two shorter options involve a lot of motoring and the sailing option involves about 5600 miles offshore with one stop in Galapagos.  We hate to motor so we're going for the long trip.  This will leave us a LOT of time to muse offshore.  I take comfort in the fact that at least we don't have to eat salt beef and hard tack the whole way!