| LONG
JOURNEY ON A SHORT BOAT
Jeffrey Dingle • M65 USA • "A Mini Made in America" 29
June '06 • 1200 Zulu • 39 N 21.8 - 36 W 55.7 After 13 days on starboard tack, this morning I gybed to port. Not quite like dinghy racing. I would say these first 13 days have gone about as smoothly as expected. I've had a few minor failures involving small lines letting go, but nothing else. Amazingly, I haven't noticed a single thing that I've forgotten to bring so far. Of the thing I have brought, the ones I appreciate most are the ones that allow me to relax and give me peace of mind. Top three on the list are my radar alarm, which will wake me up if a ship is approaching, SeaTTY, a piece of software that lets me receive Weather Fax charts from my shortwave radio, and finally the Genasun solar panel and charge controller, which give me so much power that I'll never have to worry about dead batteries and not being able to run my autopilot (=sleep!), even during cloudy weather. I should really say that most of the credit for getting me this far goes to the boat; It's been doing most of the sailing. Until now, I've had mostly tight reaches, with water splashing on deck, or calms, baking in the sun. Add those to the self-same scenery, and there really isn't a whole lot of incentive to sit up on deck steering, with one's bum soaked and abraded by the non-skid. So, aside from dishes and the occasional sail change or adjustment, I've been spending most of my time below. All the usual daily tasks certainly take much longer when performed in a small space that won't stay still. That still leaves a lot of time though, which I've been spending reading, writing, napping, working on my laptop, or sometimes really just spacing out. For once, I have more time than I know what to do with, and I've been able to enjoy even simple actions instead of rushing through them. Now I have the luxury of being able to do things well, instead of just having to do them. I can't tell you how much fun I had slicing onions the other day. Maybe this is part of what "living meditatively" means. When I was living on the boat in 2002/2003, after 6 months or so, I started wanting to be home, because I missed having a creative outlet. Reading is certainly fun, and I have a long list to catch up on, but even with a pen in hand, it's still a substantially passive activity. Notebooks are better, but jotting down ideas, sketches and calculations is still far from bringing something into existence. Now a laptop is still a far cry from a workbench (did I mention I'm an engineer?), but it allows me to come that much closer to producing something real. I've got some CAD software and a few parts catalogs, and I've been designing Genasun's next few products. I have choices to make and puzzles to solve, and the end product is just an email, a credit card number, and a week away from something I can hold and use. And it makes me smile to think that all the power required for this has been produced by Genasun's first two products. No, I haven't been lonely. I think loneliness must stem from an inaction, like failing to pick up the phone on a Friday night while sitting at home bored. Since there are no simple actions open to me that would significantly change the next time I see friends or family, there isn't any room for self-pity. I've had a lot of memories vividly pop into my head, and I often think about the adventures ahead, including returning to Boston, but the feelings associated with these thoughts are appreciation and expectation, respectively, not longing. The thing that amazes me most is that, after listening to water streaming past the hull for more than 300 hours now, day and night, I've managed to traverse such a tiny part of our enormous globe. - Alex 06/30/06 |
American
sailor Alex MeVay is almost half way across the Atlantic
on his solo transat from Boston to Europe on board his
Mini Genasun. Every day or two he checks in with Minis
in America via satellite phone or e-mail with position
reports and other news about his voyage which we post
on the