It is shortly after midnight on the sailing ship Julie Marie. On the horizon I can see the lights of the Caribbean islands of Antigua, Montserrat and Nevis in different directions.
I’ve taken over from the skipper Simon and now I’m on shift for 3 hours: that means I steer and keep a lookout. Simon has been sailing for many, many years professionally and has mainly sailed small and medium-sized ships, mostly pleasure boats. He therefore knows a lot about sailing in particular and I was able to learn a hell of a lot from him. Especially because he is a very calm and even-tempered guy who has worked a lot with volunteers and newbies and stays calm even when making unnecessary mistakes, first saves the situation and then explains to you what you should have done differently. In addition, Simon is a gifted free diver and dived with fins and without tank without any problems 10, 15 meters deep and underneath fully equipped divers.
If there is another boat nearby, the wind shifts, increases or decreases, etc., I see if I can handle the situation on my own and otherwise I wake Simon up. There are two of us. So after a 3-hour shift I have a 3-hour break and then have to get back to work. I’ve just had 2 hours sleep and feel fit. While I switched on the autopilot, which automatically holds the course, I have time to write these lines and put the many thoughts of my shifts into words. By the way, many boats now only use the autopilot, as was the case on the previous catamaran. It’s very comfortable, but if you steer it yourself, you feel the boat and its movements better.
I, for one, philosophise to myself. Sailing means freedom. That’s it.
That was always clear to me. Probably because you can slow down on a boat in the middle of the sea. And because you can go anywhere. And because you have a seemingly endless expanse around you. Starry nights without light distortion. You’re just so far away from everything else and it’s incredibly quiet:
I mainly hear the waves and the wind blowing into our sails. Now and then there is the creaking of a line and the clacking of a door that cracks on its hinges in rhythm with the rocking.
You can hear everything. When I wrote just now that I keep a lookout, I did not focus on the most important sense: listening.
That’s what makes me feel so free on a sailboat. Or rather liberated?
Because there are some doubts gnawing at freedom after all.
The first time I started to think about it was when 11-year-old Stella told me on the Beso Del Viento that we were not free when sailing because we had nowhere else to go.
She was right. Most of the time I don’t want to go anywhere else when I’m on a sailing boat, but you can’t get bread in the morning, go to the pub in the evening or go for a jog in between. (Exercise is particularly lacking during several weeks at sea, and afterwards walking is suddenly much more exhausting).
Except, of course, for good-weather yacht charter trips where you sail for 4 hours on one day and are then in the next harbour.
But even near land, you are somehow tied to the boat. You can only move along the coast of a country. Bolivia, which has no coast, is so hard to visit 😃 If you anchor, you need a dinghy to get ashore. Day trips are possible, but for longer trips you have to think about who will look after the boat, where to leave it, etc. And you want to be off the boat for too long.
And you don’t want to be away from the boat for too long, either because you’ve just paid a lot of money for chartering it or (if it’s your own) you have to ask yourself what you have the boat for if it’s just lying around. In addition, there are repairs that often mean that you can’t go where you want to go when you want to go there.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in seafaring, it’s that a boat is always a construction site. Something is always broken and the list of things to do rarely gets shorter.
So all this should be considered when you buy a boat. Somehow you are free and somehow you are also bound.
But I totally understand that it is worth it, because the feeling of being on the ocean with a boat and dolphins swimming around your boat is indescribable (among so many other great things you experience). The fact that it is an absolute privilege to own your own boat should not go unmentioned at this point. I’ll write a separate article on the ecological aspect of sailing.
At any rate, I am currently happy not to own my own boat, but simply to jump on other boats and accompany them for a while. Then I’m happy to put up with not being able to go ashore for a few days and see it more as an expression of my current freedom ☺️