News Archive
29 May 2006
A race against time
Not since I set off on the Alpha Global Expedition have I felt as pressured as I do now. The thumbscrew is the clock - seconds dribbling inexorably into the infinite void never to be recovered. With each moment of time that ticks by, my window for making the Bering Strait and the Arctic shrinks. I have now been effectively becalmed for five days, a full fifty percent of the time since I departed Honolulu. I had anticipated a fast run toward my antipodal point. My latitude is at the top of the northeast trade winds where the winds are deflected downwards and blow as easterlies. Since I am bound more or less due west, I imagined flying a spinnaker most of the way. Boat speed of 5 to 6 knots was pretty much a foregone conclusion. My routing charts indicate that here the winds come from the west less than 1% of the time, but for the last 5 days the wind, what little there has been of it has been from the west. I have made no appreciable gains for over 100 hours. I have lost 500 miles. It's depressing and frustrating. The slower the boat is in the water the better the opportunities for marine growth to colonize the hull and with that comes drag which progressively erodes boat speed and increases time to target, thus closing my window even more. I try to remain positive and optimistic. To do otherwise is foolish and unproductive. I clean the boat, check the rig, service the engine, ensure emergency procedures are practiced, plan ahead and correspond. But mostly, I read - escapism that eats time and neuters frustration. I have consumed three novels, one excellent, one okay and one so unbelievably poor I wonder how stuff like that ever gets published. My friend, Campbell Armstrong has sent out more of his thrillers, so I am saving the best till last. At the moment my literary diet is a book on Pyscho-Cybernetics by an American plastic surgeon, Maxwell Maltz MD. He died in 1975 and the book was first published in 1960 - the year of my birth. Maltz was way ahead of his time in his evaluation of the self and what it means to be productive and happy as opposed to stressed. It's apposite reading for me at the moment and conducive to the introspection and self-searching that inevitably results from long periods of isolation such as I am experiencing. I try to remain focused. I remind myself constantly that the lack of fuel to fill my sails is not some divine conspiracy to thwart my goal but nature working to nature's laws in which the irrelevance of a lone yachtsman on a small boat is not a factor to be considered. I accept, albeit grudgingly that I am at the mercy of some greater power and my mind bends to a Taoist belief that I must be as water and flow easily around obstructions rather than try to hard to roll them aside. But flow as I might, my eye is still drawn to the clock and the sweep of the hands around it's face, leaking time.