Seven Days at Sea

Location: Shelter Bay, Panama

Bro. You have no idea how exhausting that was.

Night watches are three hours long. We alternate who starts the first watch. You either do 18:00-21:00, 00:00-03:00, and 06:00-09:00, or you do 21:00-00:00 and 03:00-06:00. I like the former, because you're naturally awake during the first and the last shift and you get two solid blocks of sleep, whereas with the latter, you get one solid block of sleep and two crappy blocks (one is cut short by supper and the other is during the morning so it's light outside). Whatever the case, I only got 4-6 hours of sleep per night. As the days wore on, I got more and more tired during the day to the point that I'd only be fully awake for a few hours at dinner, and the rest of the time was spent feeling almost feverish with exhaustion. I was also seasick for the first few days due to the swells, and became thoroughly dehydrated. It felt like final exam season.

Another downside of multi-day sailing is the hygiene factor. We doused the sails every two days to stop for an ocean bath. However, due to the two- to three-meter swells, it's very difficult to bathe properly without drowning or getting ripped away from the boat. (My sinuses got a good clean when a wave broke over me.) I also lost my shampoo bottle. Jem pointed, "There! There!" Unfortunately, without glasses, "there" was just a vague shade of blue, as was everywhere else. Of course, when we went head to wind to raise the sails, we got splashed again by a huge amount of saltwater.

Not only is my skin salty, but so is everything else on this boat. whenever you hold anything in the cockpit, your hand has salt crystals on it afterwards. Furthermore, as we are going downwind and waves don't break over the bow, we leave the galley and salon (kitchen and living room) hatches open for ventilation. Unfortunately, occasionally you get rogue waves that not only toss the boat around but also get a bit of water in. I came up once to find that the floor was wet, there were various things strewn around the cockpit, and Jem was cleaning saltwater off the stove. It was an interesting sight at 6am. We closed the port hatches that day. (It is important to note that these are not side hatches; it was a 4-meter wave that curved around the boat, and water came in through a ceiling hatch, a front hatch, and the back door.) Tragically, Basil was thoroughly drenched in salt and is now on his last legs. He was a good plant; he made it all the way from the island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic, and his leaves were good in salads. He will be sorely missed.

But there were not only bad parts of this trip. I lived for the sunrises and sunsets, for the great swells that towered over the boat and pushed it to speeds of almost 16 kts, for the schools of flying fish that curved in the valleys between the swells. Now it is cloudy and the water has the colour of dark jade, but when the skies clear, it is of the purest blue, and sometimes, sunlight shines through the tops of the swells and it looks like stained glass. Birds occasionally circled around us to fish. And we saw dolphins.

We ate well as well. Monday night, Jem made a large amount of meat sauce, and we used it in pasta, with rice, and in burritos with some beans. While we were cooking that day, we caught a mahimahi, also known as dorado or dolphinfish. He was a biggie. The mahimahi gave us a few meals as well, including ceviche again, which is now one of my favourite ways to eat fish. (Fun fact: to kill the fish, we pour a shot of 69% Grenada-made rum in its gills.) Unfortunately, due to the interruption, I managed to both oversalt and overcook the pasta. (My sisters will say that me ruining pasta is normall. I promise you that this is only the second or third time. Or fourth.) Jem was thankfully very polite about it, proclaiming, "well, it's edible."

When feeling awake, night watch can actually be very pleasant. It's fun to see the curve of the swells and watch the speed increase. Sometimes, if the speed increases enough, the boat will hum. In this part of the world, the moon wanes not right to left, but top to bottom. It's so bright that sometimes it hurts to look at it, and it turns the clouds a beautiful silver. When the moon hasn't risen yet, you can see Orion and the Milky Way. It's lovely to sit on the beanbag, listen to music, and watch the dark sails moving with the wind. 

It's cold during the night, so I wear rain gear while on watch. Somehow, the lining of my raincoat tore. I want to say that this happened because of some high-winds sailing drama, but in reality, I think that the lining broke down after years of neck sweat. (I felt that you needed to know this. Sharing is caring.)

I've given the code zero, the mainsail, and the genoa nicknames. They are, respectively, Cutie, Madam, and Dickhead. (To my young neighbours if they read this: that last one is a bad word. Don't use it. Unless it's a really mean teacher, in which case, think it at them very hard.) The code zero is a giant light-winds sail, almost like an asymetrical spinnaker. She is light and dainty, and carries the boat along breezily. The mainsail is fully battened, with strips of fiberglass running along her width. She is powerful, but requires precise trimming and specific, conservative angles, lest something break. The genoa hates me. No matter how I trim it, something isn't right; it luffs somewhere that it shouldn't, or it doesn't go fast, or it gets caught somewhere annoying. We arrived in Panama barely on civil terms.

Sometimes, tankers come towards us on a collision course, and we, being a sailing vessel and therefore having priority, get to ask them to move their 100-meter-long selves for us. We asked three on this trip. The first was very nice, and exchanged pleasantries with Jem as they passed. The second asked us three times what kind of vessel we were and then told us very sternly to keep our course for the next hour, to which Jem replied, "yes, but we are going to collide in 10 minutes." Luckily, they moved away. The third was 266 meters long, the biggest we'd seen here. Jem talked to a very nice Norwegian who, before leaving, made sure to ask us if we had enough beer for the rest of the trip. (The tankers were too far away to properly photograph; this one is outside Shelter Bay.)

I'm on my fifth book since the start of this crossing. It's a detective story, and is quite fun, although I wouldn't recommend reading it at 3am when it's pitch black outside, the wind is whistling through the boom, and the sails make loud, vaguely worrying noises. Of the books read so far, I recommend the three books in The Corfu Trilogy by Gerald Durell. It's an autobiographical account of 5 years of childhood spent on the Greek island of Corfu. The wildlife is beautiful, the family is wonderfully eccentric, and general hilarity ensues. I think that my mother would like it, as our family is vaguely eccentric as well. 

Seeing Panama after a week made me excessively happy, not because we were stopping, but because I'd finally get a good shower and some sleep. I haven't had those yet because we're waiting for a nurse to show up to perform yet another nasal insertion, but I await them with relish (and ketchup and mustard). During the final hours for our crossing, we passed a fleet of anchored tankers just outside two massive arches of breakwater. Inside the breakwater were even more tankers, some monohulls, an empty cruise ship, and a slightly worrying amount of wrecks. 

We are currently docked near the mouth of the bay. There is a jungle nearby, and we can hear birdsong and see toucans flying. Apparently in the morning you can hear howler monkeys. Also present are mosquitos and oppressive heat, but I'm glad we're here. Our trip, shortened by the high winds and surfing waves, lasted exactly seven days and one hour. I'm going to take a nap now.