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February 23, 2007

Visitors

LOCATION: Arabian Sea Crossing
Day: 24
SEE WHERE WE ARE!
Longitude: N:15°12.930'
Latitude: E: 059°45.142'
Heading: 280°M
Wind: NNE, Force: 2-3
Miles total Mumbai - Djibouti: 1,856
Miles from Mumbai: 849
Miles to Djibouti: 1,007

We have a regular visitor between 8 and 8.30 every morning. It is a white Booby bird, that comes from the south, circles the boat a couple of times before flying away. I first noticed this bird around 10 days ago and have started looking out for it every morning and it has arrived unfailingly. I started thinking about this bird the other day. Is there a reason for it to visit us every morning? Maybe it realizes that we are strangers in this environment and it comes to check up on us and makes sure we're OK. Perhaps it knows that we are visiting guests here, and this is its way to make us feel welcome. These are all questions, the answers to which I will never know of course. But somehow though the sight of that bird every morning reassures me that all will be well.

Yesterday we had some other visitors of a very different ilk. It was around 5pm and we were drinking our evening tea and biscuits. It had at last started cooling down from furnace heat of the day, a time of day much looked forward to. Suddenly I noticed a boat on the horizon with smoke billowing from the chimney. We hadn't seen ship in many days so the sight of this boat raised our pulses a little. It appeared that the ship was heading in our direction, so we temporarily changed our course. We called out on our VHF radio to avert a possible collision course but got no response. Assuming the worst we immediately starting hiding all the electronics (cameras/laptops etc) and waited in anticipation for this boat to come up along side. As it pulled nearer it looked like some kind of cargo or fishing boat with the flag belonging either to Yemen or Oman (red over white over green with a crescent moon bissected by a dagger?). There must have been about 40-50 people out on deck, peering at us with intense curiosity and I suspect trying to figure out what on earth is was that we were doing. The skipper then appeared from the wheelhouse and called over to ask if we were OK. We smiled and waved back, replying that we were indeed out here by choice, in full control of our mental faculties and en route to Djibouti. I got the sense that we might have come across as being quite unfriendly after all the trouble they had taken to check up on us. After a few moments, realizing that all was well, they motored off towards the Northeast. Looking at that boat as it left I got the distinct feeling that these were the first but certainly not the last curiosity seekers that we would encounter before the end of the voyage.

After three weeks out here the mind has slowly begun to get in tune and develop an awareness of this new environment. The sights, sounds and stimuli associated with land are already a distant memory. Changes in wind speed, direction and the size of the waves are quickly detected. In this new reality the priorities are very different to what they were on land.

All the time we are affected by the action of the waves, the energy of each pushes us forward, backwards, sideways, laterally, up and down. We encounter each of these motions and after a while the mind unconsciously adapts to this energy, pre-empting the outcome very often, allowing us to better react to these different forces and maintain our balance without even thinking about it.

The sea around us appears as an uninterrupted continuum, yet in this seemingly limitless expanse of water there are changes happening all the time. The sea is constantly in a state of flux. It makes large scale experiments on us. Each day brings new experiments. Our ability to survive depends upon adapting to these constant changes. At the moment we are travelers moving along the surface. This could all change at a moments notice. Nothing is taken for granted out here.

On a more practical note we had our first pedal unit failure the day before yesterday. Traditionally it is the prop shaft that fails, but this problem seems to have fixed by the wonderful work of Mark et al from Harken marine. This time it was the vertical drive shaft running the length of the unit that broke at the weakest point where a pin secures the lower sprocket.

sher

Posted on February 23, 2007 1:49 PM