Seas and Oceans Without End

For some reason I do not understand I feel most at home on the shores and islands of the Mediterranean and Aegean and all of their embayments, straits, and tributaries – more at home even than in the country of my birth. As I have for decades when I arrive at the edge of this ancient sea I breathe deeply, bands around my chest release and I feel that I am where I am meant to be. To a lesser extent, all oceans and seas have a similar effect.

Some days we wander down the hill to a café on the rocky shore that has a platform over the water, from which you dive, or jump, into water below so clear it’s almost invisible, which then shades out to the fabled Turquoise as it gets deeper. People hang out, meet friends, swim, sunbath, drink iced drinks. Some tourists here now. From September through May it’s just us misfits.

Watching the sea this afternoon, I noticed all the sailboats were out of sight. Usually, there are a few running off the wind, or setting sail for Kastellorizo, a nearby Greek island. My mind wandered back to when I was a sailor. I first sailed the Caribbean and was transformed from a landsman to a sailor. Later I sailed the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Pacific, the South China Sea and the Sulu Sea.

Sailing the Sulu Sea, which is home to a thousand islands from the Philippines to Indonesia, was in the 70s exhilarating and dangerous. Moro pirates in fast boats with machine guns demanded tribute and kidnapped for ransom those who refused to pay. We paid. I counted myself lucky to be there and living that life.

Here is a short excerpt from The Tao of Survival that, I think, captures what it was like for me then:

I wore a sarong or swim trunks and lots of suntan lotion, and reached out from the hull of the forty-foot trimaran and dolphins swam under my hand and let me stroke them. I watched small gales moving across a flat, calm sea. We ate fish caught on lines trailed behind the craft and cooked on an open fire built on a sandbox. When the fish didn’t bite we ate rice. When the rice ran out we fasted. We beached our boat on tiny unnamed islands where we traded for papayas and mangos, and the only light came from the sun, moon, stars, and oil lamps in nipa huts. On shore we waited out storms that turned the sky dark and bruised. At all times we lived in what many would consider survival conditions. I thought we were simply living, and my heart was filled with joy.

Here’s a short piece I wrote for a sailing magazine some years ago while becalmed in Los Angeles:

Beyond the Breakwater

I know a magic place. A place where there are no ten mile traffic jams, no honking horns, no howling disk jockeys or lying politicians, and no hurly burly scrum for money. A place where you can look back on all of that as it fades away into the distance. A place where elemental forces prevail and peace comes with the knowledge that you are in the hand of something larger and more powerful than you can ever be, and where the only sounds are the lap of water, the rush of wind and the screech of gulls.

Here’s how to find this place. Clear the harbor. Cross the breakwater. Turn off your engine and set sail in any direction away from land. Send your senses outwards. Feel the heaving power of the sea as it carries you away. After a mile or so back wind your main and tie off your tiller. Drift now in the lap of the sea. Feel the damp breeze on your naked skin. Trail a hand in the water of life, maybe a dolphin will glide under your hand and press its smooth cold skin to your palm and greet you in the language of our planet. Breathe in harmony with the swells. Sailing is above all sensual.

Look back towards shore. The buildings of any city will have taken on their proper insignificance in the ageless order of the universe. Here is where life began. Here you can see clearly the true nature of our world. All the lessons needed for life can be learned here. You can sail to Cebu or Madagascar or to the enchanted isles, but whatever magic you seek or need can be found here, a mile beyond the breakwater.

No one conquers the sea. No one really conquers anything, except himself, and accomplishing that task comes more from acceptance than overcoming. There are times when we must beat into the wind to stay our course, but to get to where we are supposed to be we must find the right course just off the wind and work with the forces of the universe. Headlong insistent banging into the wind will result only in being thrown back to try again.

Deep in the night I dream of long Pacific swells rising and falling away off the coast and I float on them in a small sailboat, balanced to go wherever wind and wave will take me. The swells surge, fathomless green and dark with power. Strands of kelp fringed with foam break the surface. Gulls cry and wheel. The land, sere and baked, drifts further and further behind and I float in pelagic communion knowing that I am no more and no less than the gulls or the kelp or the plankton and am comforted by that knowing.

Together these two short pieces sum up what the sea is to me, and how sailing has been for me. And may yet be again.