LTY UPDATE: Sunday, October 7th, 2012
Day #9 of passage from Vanuatu to Marshall Islands LTY time: 17:00 (Marshall Islands time = UTC +12)
Location: about 380nm SSE of Majuro
Position: 00 49.259 S, 171 08.006 E (you can cut & past this into Google Earth to see on map)
SOG: 6.3 kts (under sail) (SOG = Speed over Ground)
COG: 011 degrees (COG = Course over Ground)
Wind: 14kts out of SSE
Seas/Swell: 2.5m @ 6 seconds SE
Weather: Skies closing in north and south with storm clouds
Air temp: 90 F 32C
Sea temp: 96 F 36 C
Barometer: 1017nm SALUBRIOUSLY SUNNY SAILING Had a marvellous night sail where the boat just seemed to glide over the water. Winds were ideal at about 12-14 knots on my beam (perpendicular) so averaged 5+ knots the whole time often into the sixes with flat seas. And just to prove that 2am is not only the time when strange and “Interesting” things seem to happen out here at sea, it was also the time when we crossed the equator this morning! I think this is the sixth crossing for Ruby and I. For the last few years I have had this great urge to want to swim across the equator, but so far every time I’ve crossed it has been at night and that trend continued for our crossing this morning so the equatorial swim will have to wait till next time. However we did stop on the equator long enough to toast King Neptune, thank him for allowing us the great privilege of sharing his world and gave him a shot of rum from each point on the compass. I keep one bottle of wine that I’ve had since I started this grand adventure for just this purpose and a special ceramic shot glass that my amazing son Skyler got for me before the first crossing when he was onboard with me in Mexico. While neither of us cared much for it, both Ruby and I had the obligatory taste of rum ourselves and bid Neptune and the southern hemisphere a fond farewell and said hello to the northern hemisphere as we sailed across this imaginary line in the sea. A few hours later, morning dawned in spectacular fashion with no low lying clouds on the eastern horizon to block the full effect. As the sun rose it was like someone had installed a huge valve into an abyss of liquid light behind the sky and it was opening to a gaping size such that there was a horizontal cataract of liquid light energy pouring out. So I perched myself in my big comfy captain’s chair and let the light drench my welcoming body and boat in sunbeams as I basked in the balmy breezes. After watching for a while I just closed my eyes and enjoyed focussing (as best my ADD riddled little brain can) on all the audio and sensory input coursing through me. After this many days on a passage you really do become even more connected with the boat than usual as all the sounds and movements seem to be wired directly into my nervous system and I they run at the unconscious level like your breathing and heartbeat. I feel each small surge or slowing of the boat as I hear the wind pick up or drop off, each tug of the sails on their sheets, the complex movement of the boat through all 3 axis of motion (pitch, roll, yaw). All these multifarious inputs combine to give me a profundity of my world that is simultaneously very small and enormous. I’ve been fascinated by the world around me since I was a small boy and always loved the science and mechanics of things. I never thought of them as a professional calling, they were more special and private than that to me. I remember my excitement of receiving a full chemistry set when I was about 8 or 10 that had a microscope, glass slides, beakers, petri dishes and various instruments and tools for gathering interesting stuff and it was like I had walked through a wormhole into a whole new universe; the world of the microscopic. I think this was also much of the drive behind my pursuit of all things mechanical, taking them apart, fixing them, upgrading them and so on. Fast forwarding to a bit more recent times I’ve been digging deeper and deeper into the sciences the past few years and reading more and more on physics, cosmology, anthropology and much more. I’m mentioning this here (I usually have a point eventually) because one of the things I’ve been struck with as I learn more about what “we” are learning about how our brains and minds work, is that we don’t literally “see” anything. Unlike the way I recall being taught, our brains are NOT like a “projectionist” watching the movie created by what comes in through our eyes. Instead all that optical input is converted into electrical signals by the “rods and cones” in the back of our eye and sent to the most incredible simulation software engine there ever was and creates these amazing models of what we typically refer to as “reality”. There is simply too much information coming in to be able to process it all at once and so instead we create models that are more enduring and don’t need to be “refreshed” every instant so that we can instead focus on just the things that change or are new. What I’m trying to say, in my usual tortuous way, is that I’ve come to realize that we get the most out of what we see when we see with our minds rather than our eyes. This means that we can make these models so much richer by adding not just the visual information but also the other sensory data we gather AND best of all, our feelings. To me at least, with more and more practice, I am finding that I have these unbelievably rich models and simulations running in my head and more and more of the time everything just blends together such that I have no sensation of “looking” at something or feeling something and simply, profoundly and powerfully just is. Is my world, is me, is the present, past and future all happening at once. Well, I doubt this makes much sense to anyone other than me but I’m bringing it up here today as I reflected on my experiences today and was struck by how everything now just flows together to create what is SO well named; the PRESENT. What a gift to be given. Every day! Every nanosecond of every day! Perhaps this will also help you understand what I mean when I say that I am such a “journey person” as opposed to being a destination person. It isn’t that one is better than the other and be assured that I enjoy my destinations very much, but I can recall observing when I was very young that I was always the happiest when I was on a journey in the sense of making my way from the last great spot to the next. This was not only literally true in that I have done a LOT of travelling in my life, but more so it was an observation about how I think. It is why learning is a way of being for me because it is this never ending, constantly in motion journey. While not necessarily grammatically correct I realize, journey and learning are “verbs” to me. They are active, moving, changing, one transition after the next. Life, at least my life, is this fluid, dynamic, ever changing, always flowing thing for me. And I think it is for everyone else too. However we can often interrupt this flow, try to control it, compartmentalize and categorize it and I’ve found that this severely lessons the experience and causes such well-known situations as living in the past or the future and missing the present. As per John Lennon’s great line; “Live is what happens while we are busy making other plans.” More so for me the journey is simply called life and also goes by the name of the present. I’m doing my best to be more “present in the present” and “experience my experiences” a bit more fully every day. It is my fondest hope that if I am having ANY success in capturing and articulating some of my experiences in these postings, then you too are finding more and more ways to be present in your present and experience your experiences a bit more fully every day. Speaking of the present, the light is fading out here as the sun starts to set somewhere out there behind all the growing accumulation of clouds that have been growing all afternoon. After a gloriously sunny and clear morning I’ve sailed through two more lines of storms this afternoon and I suspect there is another one or two laying on my course northward here tonight. Nothing significant, just higher and changing winds and some rain for a bit and I often have to reef the sails a bit or change course to cross them in the shortest time and then continue north. The wind has been great all day and has now swung all the way round to the SSE as have the seas, so I’ve got both the wind and the seas behind me which makes for a very quiet sail as the latitude counter starts to go up now and we head for Majuro which is at about 7 degrees north. Less than four hundred nautical smiles to go now and if conditions continue to cooperate and our speed holds we should be anchored in Majuro on Wednesday sometime. However it goes you will be amongst the first to know and thanks again for joining me on this latest “journey”! Wayne
Day #9 of passage from Vanuatu to Marshall Islands LTY time: 17:00 (Marshall Islands time = UTC +12)
Location: about 380nm SSE of Majuro
Position: 00 49.259 S, 171 08.006 E (you can cut & past this into Google Earth to see on map)
SOG: 6.3 kts (under sail) (SOG = Speed over Ground)
COG: 011 degrees (COG = Course over Ground)
Wind: 14kts out of SSE
Seas/Swell: 2.5m @ 6 seconds SE
Weather: Skies closing in north and south with storm clouds
Air temp: 90 F 32C
Sea temp: 96 F 36 C
Barometer: 1017nm SALUBRIOUSLY SUNNY SAILING Had a marvellous night sail where the boat just seemed to glide over the water. Winds were ideal at about 12-14 knots on my beam (perpendicular) so averaged 5+ knots the whole time often into the sixes with flat seas. And just to prove that 2am is not only the time when strange and “Interesting” things seem to happen out here at sea, it was also the time when we crossed the equator this morning! I think this is the sixth crossing for Ruby and I. For the last few years I have had this great urge to want to swim across the equator, but so far every time I’ve crossed it has been at night and that trend continued for our crossing this morning so the equatorial swim will have to wait till next time. However we did stop on the equator long enough to toast King Neptune, thank him for allowing us the great privilege of sharing his world and gave him a shot of rum from each point on the compass. I keep one bottle of wine that I’ve had since I started this grand adventure for just this purpose and a special ceramic shot glass that my amazing son Skyler got for me before the first crossing when he was onboard with me in Mexico. While neither of us cared much for it, both Ruby and I had the obligatory taste of rum ourselves and bid Neptune and the southern hemisphere a fond farewell and said hello to the northern hemisphere as we sailed across this imaginary line in the sea. A few hours later, morning dawned in spectacular fashion with no low lying clouds on the eastern horizon to block the full effect. As the sun rose it was like someone had installed a huge valve into an abyss of liquid light behind the sky and it was opening to a gaping size such that there was a horizontal cataract of liquid light energy pouring out. So I perched myself in my big comfy captain’s chair and let the light drench my welcoming body and boat in sunbeams as I basked in the balmy breezes. After watching for a while I just closed my eyes and enjoyed focussing (as best my ADD riddled little brain can) on all the audio and sensory input coursing through me. After this many days on a passage you really do become even more connected with the boat than usual as all the sounds and movements seem to be wired directly into my nervous system and I they run at the unconscious level like your breathing and heartbeat. I feel each small surge or slowing of the boat as I hear the wind pick up or drop off, each tug of the sails on their sheets, the complex movement of the boat through all 3 axis of motion (pitch, roll, yaw). All these multifarious inputs combine to give me a profundity of my world that is simultaneously very small and enormous. I’ve been fascinated by the world around me since I was a small boy and always loved the science and mechanics of things. I never thought of them as a professional calling, they were more special and private than that to me. I remember my excitement of receiving a full chemistry set when I was about 8 or 10 that had a microscope, glass slides, beakers, petri dishes and various instruments and tools for gathering interesting stuff and it was like I had walked through a wormhole into a whole new universe; the world of the microscopic. I think this was also much of the drive behind my pursuit of all things mechanical, taking them apart, fixing them, upgrading them and so on. Fast forwarding to a bit more recent times I’ve been digging deeper and deeper into the sciences the past few years and reading more and more on physics, cosmology, anthropology and much more. I’m mentioning this here (I usually have a point eventually) because one of the things I’ve been struck with as I learn more about what “we” are learning about how our brains and minds work, is that we don’t literally “see” anything. Unlike the way I recall being taught, our brains are NOT like a “projectionist” watching the movie created by what comes in through our eyes. Instead all that optical input is converted into electrical signals by the “rods and cones” in the back of our eye and sent to the most incredible simulation software engine there ever was and creates these amazing models of what we typically refer to as “reality”. There is simply too much information coming in to be able to process it all at once and so instead we create models that are more enduring and don’t need to be “refreshed” every instant so that we can instead focus on just the things that change or are new. What I’m trying to say, in my usual tortuous way, is that I’ve come to realize that we get the most out of what we see when we see with our minds rather than our eyes. This means that we can make these models so much richer by adding not just the visual information but also the other sensory data we gather AND best of all, our feelings. To me at least, with more and more practice, I am finding that I have these unbelievably rich models and simulations running in my head and more and more of the time everything just blends together such that I have no sensation of “looking” at something or feeling something and simply, profoundly and powerfully just is. Is my world, is me, is the present, past and future all happening at once. Well, I doubt this makes much sense to anyone other than me but I’m bringing it up here today as I reflected on my experiences today and was struck by how everything now just flows together to create what is SO well named; the PRESENT. What a gift to be given. Every day! Every nanosecond of every day! Perhaps this will also help you understand what I mean when I say that I am such a “journey person” as opposed to being a destination person. It isn’t that one is better than the other and be assured that I enjoy my destinations very much, but I can recall observing when I was very young that I was always the happiest when I was on a journey in the sense of making my way from the last great spot to the next. This was not only literally true in that I have done a LOT of travelling in my life, but more so it was an observation about how I think. It is why learning is a way of being for me because it is this never ending, constantly in motion journey. While not necessarily grammatically correct I realize, journey and learning are “verbs” to me. They are active, moving, changing, one transition after the next. Life, at least my life, is this fluid, dynamic, ever changing, always flowing thing for me. And I think it is for everyone else too. However we can often interrupt this flow, try to control it, compartmentalize and categorize it and I’ve found that this severely lessons the experience and causes such well-known situations as living in the past or the future and missing the present. As per John Lennon’s great line; “Live is what happens while we are busy making other plans.” More so for me the journey is simply called life and also goes by the name of the present. I’m doing my best to be more “present in the present” and “experience my experiences” a bit more fully every day. It is my fondest hope that if I am having ANY success in capturing and articulating some of my experiences in these postings, then you too are finding more and more ways to be present in your present and experience your experiences a bit more fully every day. Speaking of the present, the light is fading out here as the sun starts to set somewhere out there behind all the growing accumulation of clouds that have been growing all afternoon. After a gloriously sunny and clear morning I’ve sailed through two more lines of storms this afternoon and I suspect there is another one or two laying on my course northward here tonight. Nothing significant, just higher and changing winds and some rain for a bit and I often have to reef the sails a bit or change course to cross them in the shortest time and then continue north. The wind has been great all day and has now swung all the way round to the SSE as have the seas, so I’ve got both the wind and the seas behind me which makes for a very quiet sail as the latitude counter starts to go up now and we head for Majuro which is at about 7 degrees north. Less than four hundred nautical smiles to go now and if conditions continue to cooperate and our speed holds we should be anchored in Majuro on Wednesday sometime. However it goes you will be amongst the first to know and thanks again for joining me on this latest “journey”! Wayne
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