day 7/day 8 - halfway!!!

water
Originally uploaded by lawatt

we officially hit our halfway point of the trip a few minutes before 3am on day 8 (june 14) -- just as David and I were going off our nightwatch. while he was below waking the others, I took that moment of solitude to dig out my old apartment key, to my place on mariposa ave. -- I'd lived there for the past 7 years, and while I loved living there, it also had contained a lot of heartbreak and difficult times, peices of which I was really hoping to let fall away on this trip, to finally leave behind. so, i held my key tight for a few moments, concentrating on all the comfort that home had given me -- and then chucked it overboard. so it can lie there on the ocean floor, a thousand miles from the nearest land, and hopefully take some of those harder memories with it -- not to pretend they didn't happen, but to hopefully help me move on to some new places.

and then everyone piled into the cockpit -- Mouse had a sailing friend, Earl, who'd passed away before they could do an ocean crossing together, so she'd brought a beer (specifically a Miller Light, they'd always drunk them together) to share with him at our halfway point -- so she opened and sipped his beer, then threw it in the sea (aluminum cans oxidize pretty quickly in salt water, as long as you are sure to make the can sink), and she, David and I all joined Earl with beers of our own, and we all toasted being almost as far from land as anyone on earth can be -- the MOST remote place is probably a little north of where we were, would need to triangulate from hawaii, the west coast, and the aleutians to the north -- but we were at least a thousand miles from any land, which felt pretty darned cool.

and others came to the party as well! we had two birds (petrels?) following the boat closely, swooping and diving in our aft running light, almost landing on the transom -- and this was also the ONLY time on the trip we saw huge clusters of phosphorescent planktons, looking for all the world like giant paper lanterns or disco-balls under water!!! that plus the usual sparkles at the water's surface really added to the festivities.

and like all good party guests, they knew when to leave -- when David and I woke up again at 6am for our next watch, birds and phosphorescence were both gone, leaving only a few isolated sparks in the surf as we passed along the ocean's quiet surface -- but it felt so good to once again be moving CLOSER to something, instead of always getting farther away.

halfway home, hurrah!!!