Approaching Fernando de Noronha

Closer view:

I'm spurred to write this morning because a momentous thing will occur later today. I stand on the deck in amidst the spray that is hurled as the bow crashes down into the blue. Holding on to one of the shrouds I stretch my neck forwards to see, but still there is nothing. According to the chart we are 40 miles off, and the island I am looking for rises to 300meters, but maybe we are still too far and it is a little hazy.

I sat in a pizza place with some friends in Tavistock about a week before I set sail on my ocean odyssey. I was trying to remember the name of the first landfall on the way to Brazil, coming from Europe. Fernando de Noronha, I told them, having to look it up on my phone.

Three months later and we are making a northerly approach, we'll be there by dusk for certain.

I've another week of sailing before we reach Salvador, my port of entry to Brazil, chosen mainly for two reasons. Firstly it is a destination that will set me south in the Brazil current, and secondly, it was the only place I could find on the internet that didn't carry warnings of armed gangs boarding and robbing yachts whilst in port!

When I think back to leaving the west African port of Banjul, I cannot quite comprehend that two weeks have passed by. It has been a stretched out elongated continual experience defined by wind and sea, and sweat! My world has been rocking and swaying, the constant swish and rush of the water, and I've been seeing to it that I eat well and look after myself, both physically and mentally.

My passage through the doldrums was a successful execution of navigational planning that never saw me without a good breeze to fill the sails. There was a sense of the prehistoric as I travelled through a point on the planet that has never changed in billions of years, the sea, the sun, the clouds, the stars, the planets all completing their daily cycle, undisturbed and mostly undiscovered.

I have plotted my course and watched the little row of markers on my iPad grow into a definitive chain that has stretched and will continue to stretch for over 2000 miles.

In common with the ever changing landscape of the sea, I have tracked my changing moods and mental states. There has been quite a combination to observe, ranging from exhilaration and excitement to lethargy, negativity and boredom. Just a few days ago I started to feel a little stir crazy, my boat had become my prison cell, with truly no escape. I sat that evening watching the sunset over the western horizon and sang out loud some Hindu chanting that I'd picked up on my travels in India. Within minutes my mood had started to lift. Everything is sacred, this bodily form is but a fleeting visitor in the eternity that is consciousness. An effective treatment for my malaise.

This passage has also been defined by unrelenting heat during the days, slightly less so at night. It is a constant +33 degrees in the cabin and I make many visits up on deck to cool down, usually under the harsh glare of the sun. I find the most comfortable times are the dawn and the dusk. On this current bearing I am always at risk of being pelted by sea water as the bow crashes into each wave, sometimes annoying but rarely unpleasant.

Having not had a full night of sleep in two weeks I conclude that I am underlyingly tired and would quite welcome a change in some way! This passage is not a journey, rather more, it is an experience. A journey cannot possibly take three weeks. You simply swap one set of experiences for another, and then try to tell that to your mind. Mind likes to involve itself with facts and figures and distances and measurements. The fact is that we move at about 5mph, 24 hours per day and slowly the dot on the map moves. Some changes in wind, weather, sea state, but beyond that, this is something that to my modern conditioned mindset is almost incomprehensible, yet I know that in a weeks time I'll be on the South American continent, in the Southern Hemisphere.

And now I'll keep nipping up to the foredeck until I can shout land ho! And after I do, it will take maybe 12 hours until it will be distant to my stern. At sea, somethings happen very slowly!

(Posted by Nick. Whilst at sea Dan has a text-only email facility which he's used to email me this blog.)