The midnight to 0300 watch is always a long one. This morning I spent the first hour up and down between the cockpit and the watermaker supervising a 5 litre squeeze of the North Atlantic. The moon had gone - hazy overcast, occasional gaps with murky stars poking a few photons through - shapeless, grey, woolly night, no meeting of the sky and the horizon, just a faint change in density. Blacker the closer to the boat you look except! Except for the phosphorescence - writhing jade green swirls of smoky water with zillions of sparkles instantly there and gently fading. Lovely - reminded me of the Milky Way, invisible tonight - and then Douglas Adams and his dolphins and my first voyage metaphor of the Milky Way as the phosphorescent streak of the dolphins across the heavens. And then some idle speculation about spacetime as a doughnut - a toroidal whimsy - or perhaps as a series of nesting Russian dolls - could the Universe as we know it, with all its billions and gerzillions of stars and gas clouds and black holes and dark matter - could all this be just the workings of a small part of the brain of a cockroach in the next biggest universe as it nibbles some happy camper's toes?
And idly thinking about Trafalgar - which, along with Waterloo ten years later formed the basis for the next 100 years of peace in Europe, the Pax Britannica. But here on the old slave route it's hard not to see it from the point of view of native peoples everywhere else who were systematically subdued, transported, enslaved and otherwise looted during that century by the British, the Dutch, French, Spanish, Germans, Portugese and Italians who had the time and military resources to do so as they weren't fighting eachother.
Sitting up there in the cockpit you can become mesmerised by scale and its effects. My niece had to make a business trip from Luxembourg to Rio recently - odd to think that she was only 6 miles above some part of Berri's recent track - and how much of the world many of us have actually been within 6 miles of without knowing anything about what is below. I see winking strobes high above, or a growing con trail in the distance pushing so fast across what to us is a vast expanse of planet. That tiny - invisible - speck with 300 people in it and several tons of avtur in the tanks - how much energy is locked up in that stuff and how much is dissipated as heat
And so on for three hours...
Another sailing vessel just sailed across our stern - about the same size, sailing a more southerly course, couldn't see anyone on deck, called on the VHF but no answer. Couldn't see any sail number. Wonder who and where...
