June 17, 2010
By Ellie Kane
The thing about sailing is that it magnifies everything. That lunch I just had? Delicious. The food simply amazes out here: fresh salad (a luxury we'll enjoy for only a few more days); Italian sausages with peppers and onions on homemade rolls and potato chips; baked brie with raspberry jam; chicken curry over rice and Nan; or pancakes hot off the griddle, dripping with syrup and running into the bacon I'd been smelling since 0530 while I stood dawn watch.
As good as those meals are, they come after a long string of worsts. There's nothing like becoming reacquainted with breakfast over the side of the Cramer, only to have a mate hand you a hose and tell you to clean up. Or waking up at 0230 for a four-hour watch as your stomach gurgles and you think of your bed at home, quiet and still. It might be beautiful to watch the sun rise, feel the first stirrings of day until you realize that between you and your bunk is not only picking 300 pieces of plastic out of a sieve but also dawn cleanup: scrubbing the heads (bathrooms), showers, and soles (floors) of the ship until your knees ache and your hands are coated with grimy, black water.
There are times – mid-watch for one, when I sleep for two hours and then stand watch from 2300 to 0300 hours – that I ask myself why I'm doing this. Are engine room checks – which require banging around in the dark as swells throw you from the battery to the generator and make an already hot, damp night even hotter and damper – really worth it? Can I possibly keep my eyes open for another three and a half hours, only to wake up later today and do it all over again?
But then there's standing on the foredeck as the bioluminescence thrown up by our bow wave slowly fades into the gray, then pink and red of dawn over the bowsprit as we head east. There are jokes between watches, told on the quarterdeck. There is laughing and singing in the lab that brings curious eyes. There is picking a tiny squid out of a neuston tow and feeling gratified as our plastic and species counts grow with our miles from home. Or there is now, when I head up on deck with my book and enjoy a few hours in the late afternoon cool with a guitar strumming in the background and miles of blue around me.
We'll all get back from this trip and over a round of beers back home, or on a payphone from Bermuda tell friends and family that it was the best time ever. We'll forget our lurching stomachs, our stubbed toes, sunburned shoulders and sweaty hours doing dishes. Instead, our new friend's laughter will ring out of the echo of memory and we'll take our Chaco tans and pictures back home, happy to have been a part of shipboard life.
