Meaningful Coincidences
Posted by Dave at 08:40 AM, October 14, 2004
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| (C) Greenpeace |
Even though we're far west of Europe, we're still operating on Greenwich Mean Time. This makes for what appear to be very dark mornings, and extraordinarily long evenings. It's dark now though. I'm sitting in the campaign office behind the bridge of the Esperanza (with another four decks down below), the ship is rolling from side to side, and the wind is howling around the masts. Some of the crew are sitting in the lounge, chatting, others have gone to bed, and some are in the mess, watching a movie. Up here, I have to do a little workout in my chair just to stay upright!
It was another big day on the ocean - now we're really in the middle of nowhere. Out here, you can see for miles - and watch the weather as it arrives. Even rainstorms show up on the radar, before they strike. Today brought us heavy enough seas and a 28-knot wind, but there was sunshine too. During the morning, we were treated to a double rainbow - the inner one was the most vibrant, completely whole, and so close we could see nearby waves through it!
There's seems to be a long tradition on Greenpeace expeditions, seemingly started by founder member Bob Hunter, of paying attention to synchronicities - meaningful coincidences, as proposed by the famous psychologist Carl Jung. It may seem silly, but rainbows have a habit of showing up at the most perfect of times. On my last trip, in the Tasman Sea, we found our first bottom trawler at the end of a rainbow. How cliched is that?
And so today - a couple of hours after our double rainbow, we spot our first fishing boat. It's bobbing around in the huge swell, several miles away, but every pair of binoculars is trained on it, trying to pick out some detail. As it grows closer, we can tell that it's not a bottom trawler - it's a gill-netter. Not what we're after, but we're aren't dismayed - we exchange greetings with the trawler crew and continue on. The hunt continues...
- Dave
