Life at sea

Posted by Adele at 10:18 AM, October 28, 2004

The lonely stacs of St Kilda (C) Greenpeace/Walsh

You know something, when it starts it is kind of fun, everything creaks, teaspoons in cups swing around, and you hear distant crashing of plates, faraway disasters. It is the single weirdest thing about living here, and the one it takes me longest to get rid of when I get off. Then it is not fun anymore. Having to hold your plate of food lest it fly across the room. And around these seas it will stay like this for a while. Heavy wide rolling, my chair slides back, then forward, and I almost fall. Then a voice comes off the PA system in the lounge: changing course, get ready for rolling. What?

Looking out the waves are so blue, wrinkling up a few metres, and bits of salty foam from the tops get blown away in a spray by the wind. It is very beautiful to see. The sight of the stormy Atlantic, the effects on our minute-to-minute lives make you feel really tiny. Looking out I can also see cloud formations, and we pass through a couple of minutes of hail. Its ice, man, says Erkut, who has seen it before in Turkey. I don't believe him, I would rather think it is big grains of salt falling from the sky. But it is ice, a very exotic event, and it hurts if it falls on you.

The other night, two hours of radio watch. I have this little radio my father gave to me before I left, and sometimes as we approach land I turn it on. If we are far it's static, then it only gets Radio 4, as we get near civilisation the dial fills up. Now I am looking for radio communication between bottom trawlers, scanning the air, in a room full of radios, red LEDs everywhere, computer radios, HF radios, VHF radios, direction finders, oscilloscopes. There was nothing. No humans anywhere around apart from us.

Really tiny, and the sea so big. How would it look like if it was completely transparent, and we could look down all the way to the bottom? If we could see the valleys we are sailing over? But we cant see, and it might as well not exist. It might as well be just us, and nothing else.

- Mir