Metamorphosis
Not all boats are created equal. This guy coming in the inlet as we are going out is about 800’ long.
We departed Beaufort, North Carolina, out the inlet into the ocean. Going offshore we wear a lot of layers: the clothes to keep us warm: multiple shirts, pants, fleece. Over that, waterproof overalls and coat, all topped with a Spinlock life vest…not the puffy scratchy orange lifejacket of my uncomfortable youth, but a skinny vest that would inflate if you were to go into the water. It’s compact, but dense and kind of heavy and has straps that circumnavigate each leg. It also serves as a harness, with a springy double line secured to the center of it, in order for you to clip in when on deck, and you won’t have to actually go fall in the water and require the use of the aforementioned life vest. It’s quite a get-up, and you feel a little Michelin-man-y or astronautic clomping around in it on the pitching boat. When you have to pee, off come as many layers as you need and back on again and you’re lurching around inside a rollicking boat trying to get your foot through the fucking leg strap. Fortunately, there is no video record of this activity (or even audio for that matter).
We morph from earthlings to sea-lings. At first it is, in fact, uncomfortable. Your body is resisting the transformation; you’re an animal and you’re in danger, even if your human brain can tell you’re perfectly safe. Your fight-or-flight brain is shutting down your systems. It reminds me of when I would throw a towel over my dog’s head, and she’d freeze, like “if I don’t move this will soon be over.” It feels like that, like your body is on strike. All is not right, hold still. You drink water; you try to eat because your human brain knows this will help. But your animal brain is not happy with the program and can get pretty cranky (see referenced video above of getting feet through the leg straps).
Our two life vests/harnesses having a conversation. They won’t inflate unless they’re submerged.
We take turns being on watch: two hours on, two off. Being on watch is a different way to be. At night you have to watch for other boats, obstructions, and to make sure your boat is headed in the right direction. That means you need to focus, but there is idle time where your mind is most definitely drifting. (Not the boat! The boat’s not drifting, the boat’s on course!). You’re awake in the night, not because of anxiety or restlessness—being awake is your job. You’re looking at the water, but not for a brief view out the restaurant window. You’re in it, on duty, in the night, in the ocean (Not in the ocean; you’re clipped in!!)
You’re not really doing anything. But you have to pay attention. But what my mind seems to want to do to entertain itself is sing. And for some reason it sings the songs of the 70s. I sing Elton John, Joni Mitchell (no one can hear me, it’s ok), the Beatles. I sing songs of summer camp and elementary school: Señor Don Gato and Blood on the Saddle. I sing Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar. I sing one-hit-wonder songs from the radio that I don’t even know whose song it is, but somehow my brain retains the lyrics. (Taking up the space of the things I actually wish I could remember.)
And then my watch is over—2 hours on, then I peel off some of the layers, while Tim goes up for his watch, and I take my two-hour stint in the bed, rocking and rolling until I’m on again.
We have a cabin directly under the cockpit, with a porthole for easy communication. The cabin is cozy and snug, and those two hours are sacred. You’d think it would be hard to sleep, that the movement would be too much, but I just conk right out every time. And then 120 minutes later, back up for the shift change. The moon rose so bright I kept feeling it was headlights in my rearview. But no, everything else is quite dark and everyone else is quite far away, and we work to keep it that way. In the new-to-us world of the AIS, we can see how far away the other boats are (if they have AIS), and their boat name, and their compass direction and speed. There’s a place on the AIS that tells you that if you keep up your speed and direction, and boat X keeps up his, your closest point of approach will be ½ mile in 45 minutes (or whatever). So, there’s all that to keep up with, and the horizon to scan and the radar to decipher, and then the horizon to scan. The chart promises that the area of the ocean we’re in is a designated Right Whale breeding ground, so of course I’m also on high whale alert (not out of fear but out of enthusiasm). The moon sets. The stars are abundant. (On Tim’s cumulative shifts he saw 8 shooting stars!) Eventually the sun rises. Experienced in 2-hour increments, all to the sounds of the 70s in my head. During the day we’re a little more relaxed about the shifts, expanding them to three hours, and we have more overlap. We still take turns, but there is light; we can see and talk to each other. I might have seen some vague blow-hole activity, but I can’t be sure. Eventually, the sun sets again, and we’re back to two-hours at a time.
In this altered state, it’s not that you’re stupid, exactly. It’s just that you’ve shut down some of your operations. You’ve left on the operations that help the boat’s mission. Some damn person has left on the radio station of my youth, but generally you don’t need a lot of bells and whistles. You just need to manage the boat and keep yourself present.
As we get closer to Charleston, we can see lights in the distance on the ocean side of the boat. They look kind of close, but after consulting AIS we learn there are maybe a dozen large container ships waiting miles away for their turn to come into port. We can see the gauntlet we’ll be running through the inlet into Charleston, anticipate the complexities of boat traffic and lights we’ll have to interpret and respond to in order to get to our anchorage for the night. But it’s knowing we’ll be leaving the expansive quiet of the ocean, that our minds will be morphing back into their terrestrial selves that feels surprisingly disappointing.
