The red water pants with suspenders
Wow! Just arrived after my first three days and nights on a sailing boat on the open Mediterranean Sea. I must be as motivated and clueless as one can be. This is truly a new experience, one of those sensations you didn’t know could exist, like the first time you try Indian food and you taste in your mouth that genuinely new flavor, when you assume all the imaginable tastes and combinations of them were already covered, and there you are, eating a Chicken Korma and saying to yourself, “Mmmmm…this is so strange and so delicious!!” That’s what these three days have been, full of new sensations when I thought all the ones in the catalog had been sensed.
Seventy-two hours being cold on the deck under the pouring rain, cooking in a swinging kitchen, trying to keep balance in a house that moves in all directions at all times. The hardest is to brush your teeth and be able to spit inside the sinks, while not losing all of them against it. I slept in the cockpit every night, looking at the huge waves and sliding back and forth on the bench…I thought I would be scared and I was actually thrilled and amazed. I also thought I would puke all the way and it didn’t even happen once. Strange, huh? What you expect doesn’t happen, it’s what you don’t expect that makes the memories, especially now that everything is such a new environment for me.
Seventy-two hours, or who knows, around there, time is not measured in hours here, the smallest unit used is the day, partitions of this are unimportant, too tiny for the speed you travel. It’s as if you were living in a different measuring scale, like the way in geological time a couple of years means nothing. Curious, used to being stuck to the watch all life long. Clocks are only used to start the shifts of watches. So life, otherwise divided into a asleep-awaken routine, change to a sleep-awake-half asleep-half awaken-slept for two hours-awaken for four-awaken again cos you can’t sleep-lightly asleep…you lose track of time, it’s hard to know how long have you been on the sea. I should start making cuts on the wall like prisoners do.
Now we are in Gibraltar. Last night the waves were so high and strong I kept falling down from my bed. In the morning the other crew told me that there’s a small panel under my mattress that you put beside the bed to avoid exactly that. Aha! And I had been wondering what that piece of wood was doing there. At least I didn’t throw it in the garbage…
We will stay here one or two days, until the storm passes by, then we’ll head to the Canary Islands for our last stop before we go for the Atlantic crossing. Three weeks in the middle of the ocean, sounds crazy to me, in my wildest dreams I couldn’t have seen myself being a sailor on a boat going to America. One of those movie-like adventures that you dream of doing but never really think about. Like flying a plane, or having to find your way through the woods for a week. I don’t know, we all see those stories on TV, and maybe picture ourselves in the place of the star, but that’s about as far as it goes.
It feels so natural now that sometimes I even forget how the hell did I get into it in the first place, if a witch had told me the future one year ago, I’d have laughed. Back then I was still living in the Flying Pig Palace in Amsterdam, I hadn’t even started working for Unisys, and I was definitely far from thinking about spending some time with my good friend Melanie in Turkey because “it’s sooo cheap for fifteen days, plane, hotel and breakfast!!”
Two weeks that turned into four months and, suddenly, I find myself here in Gibraltar, with a pair of red water pants up to my waist with suspenders, inventing recipes to use the food that’s about to die and spending hours just looking at the sea go before my eyes. What a different world, the sea world. The way of living, the names of things, the attitude of people, the strange stuff you come to know. It’s always been there, but unless you are inside you are oblivious to all of it. A whole network completely on the surface that, for the ones on firm ground, couldn’t be more hidden.
Well, I gotta go cook for the crew now. Today, vegetables with sauce, I think the eggplant is already looking funny.
