In response to my ‘High Water Mark’ entry, Alex commented

THIS IS NOT OK [her caps]

This was her response to the following passage in the blog which she quoted in full

“I am beginning, just beginning to accept a part of the rhythm of the sea into my life. It is a Zen moment. Self is far less important than the current undersea picking my bones in whispers.”

As she has commented publicly (see blog) I now wish to dedicate my next entry to her and as you will see, I direct my remarks directly to her in person, so here I begin:

First of all I congratulate you for being able to read many of the words behind the parent without cringing. I think your exceeding tolerance is due in part to the fact that you are already an accomplished writer and you understand well the separation between author and text. You are able to fill a column, complete an inch or two, and I understand that you have some pretensions towards the comic, although I have not so far been privy to that wonderful feature of your amazing sparkling mind.

Is human writing inspired like the production of the wolf that howls by instinct and wakes the hibernating moles roused from sleep by the sheer terror and utter closeness of the hungry jaws that will not be denied? Is it an inchoate expression of an inner hunger that will not be satisfied, but ever gnaws the vitals of the howler until expression grants a temporary relief?

I do not know the answers to these questions, but what I can say is that writing for me is the most important need after the basic bodily essentials have been quelled. I can live utterly without it, and I have done so, for like you I am a contrary being with a degree of self-hatred, but in that experiment the curse remained, and life was two-dimensional, like some sort of pre-death purgatory.

As you know I have kept the wolf from the door by writing commercially, which I know you hope to do (and of course you know that I will expend a major part of my treasure to help you to do this). Well we know all this, but our readers may not, so that is why I state it.

But what is the wolf of the preceding paragraph? It has a dual significance. On the one hand I have been lucky and skillful enough to make a good living out of writing, and that has in part kept the wolf from the door in our family – notwithstanding the outstanding contribution and husbandry of resources of your mother.

On the other hand my commercial writing has quelled the inner schweinhund that dictates that for me mere money-grubbing is not enough, for with the talents I have been given I must add to the wisdom of the tribe or else I shall die embittered and unhappy, and like most men and women simply have been, in the parlance of Leonardo, a shit-producer.

So the big question now, having put aside my ‘oaten reeds’ at the diesel factory is how to ‘blazon broad among your learned throng’ and find a way such that ‘Fierce warres and faithful loves shall moralize my song’

These references are to Spenser Faerie Queene, prologue. And this flight into literature is a key. To me, ‘before the fall’, literature furnished the materials of our trade and so its study was the study that could help you to find your own unique voice.

Christ did no less, for on the cross he quoted scripture – ‘Eloi, eloi, eloi aramai?’ (My God, my God, my God, why has thou forsaken me) – if I remember my 1st century Hebrew correctly.

And so we approach the high water mark. In T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land there is a whole section which was originally many hundreds of lines, but which Ezra Pound reduced to the following which I quote from memory.

“Phlebas the Phoenician
A fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls
and the deep sea swell
and the profit and loss.
As he rose and fell
He passed the stages
Of his age and youth
A current undersea
Picked his bones
In whispers
Entering the whirlpool

Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel
And look to windward
Consider Phlebas
Who was once
Tall and handsome
As you.”

Now this is a fragment of the greatest poem of the 20th century which in my opinion stands in line as the last damp squib of the epic tradition – holding the line: Homer-Virgil-Beowulf poet-Chaucer-Spenser-Milton.

This great poem has been my companion since I was a little younger than you are now, when in contrast to your situation in which access to literature is your mundane obligation, I was at sea as a mere rating (i.e. not an officer) in the merchant service, aspiring to the almost impossible ambition of going to university, a stage of life in which I had formerly failed. So when I speak of a literary ‘companion’ it is like the third person that two disciples were aware of walking between them.

As I descended at the age of twenty-two to the edge of the sea across the green sward of the Botanic Gardens in Sydney, with the grand blinding white segments of the Opera House ahead, and the ‘Bridge to Heaven’ (as I called the Harbour bridge) behind, those words quoted above rose unbidden into my consciousness, and I declared them aloud. Since then Phlebas has always been with me if I was prepared to listen to him, and particularly on the night on which I wrote the ‘High Water Mark’.

Now I may have been guilty of the misdeed that your mum frequently (and justly) accuses me of. That is, I was commenting on my own inner feelings directly rather than carrying the reader across from their morning toast to my ‘deathless prose’. But I have been trying to experiment with ‘elision’ – that is the removal of unnecessary detail which for example Hemingway believed could and should be done to transform the mundane into art.

I hope what I have said above goes some way to explain why I decided to make the particular marks on the virtual page that were made that day.

I do not of course limit my reference to Eliot, other sources include

The Noachan continuum
Sea change – vide The Tempest
Odyssey passim
Norse myth – especially concerning the edge of the world
Beowulf
Crusoe
Much of Conrad
Bible alter Noah

That is all I have time for today, for I am now in the midst of another classroom course, and  am loaded with homework about tidal predictions, courses over the ground, and chart symbols. Symbols – now those are a powerful tool in our development of the individual style!

Please accept these remarks.

Approaching in a row boat armed to the teeth we come closer, ever closer to the darkened target ship as it looms no more than a darkened patch of sea from which no starlight is reflected. Many times the reckless attack has carried away the unsuspecting crew greater in number than their adversaries. Hacking through hawsers we have set the sails to the land breeze that flows outwards from land when land is warmer than sea, as is usual at night, for the land cools faster than the sea.

A little more prosaic was my own cutting out expedition in the last night of the Raja Muda regatta. Armed to the waist with scissors, a scrap of sail repair tape and a wad of dry kitchen paper I planned to deface a notice on a rival boat. My school colleague acted as lookout. She reported the coast as clear. I measured the lower half of a capital ‘R’ intending to change it into a ‘B”. This ‘R’ was the beginning of the word ‘RUM’ and it advertised this drink produced by a company sponsoring the regatta.

This minimalist approach was not my idea, but the brainchild of this man

I would need to cut out the lower loop from the tape and to stick it over the bar of the ‘R’. The kitchen paper – like the tinder taken on such expeditions in the age of sail – was essential to dry the fabric, for it was indeed a dark and stormy night.

“All clear” hissed my lookout, and I set to with the scissors, only to be arrested by a sharp challenge.

“What the hell are you doing?” demanded a voice. I replied with as nonchalant an air as I could muster:

“Just doing a spot of sail repair, don’t cha know, old chap”.

“Right you bugger, let’s be having a look at you! Now what are you about?”

“Ok, it’s a fair cop” I replied, abandoning my innocent stance as utterly untenable for I was caught red-handed, hard up by his notice with scissors and tape in hand.

“I was just going to change your ‘R’ to a ‘B’ and you’ve caught me red-handed.”

“I like your style, young fellah, come aboard and have a rum” was his generous response.

And that is how I made the acquaintance of yet another crafty sailor. Amongst other things he explained how he had passed by an island when apparently becalmed, as indeed we had seen him be. We had gone wide to avoid the wind shadow, whereas he had stood in, bearing the wind shadow for he expected the island to part the tidal current and acting like an aerofoil on its long side, for their to be a strong current in which he would be pulled around, as indeed had been found to be the case on the day. He did not care about wind if he could use the current, and he could.

In the best spirit, after considerable flow of the spirits with which I was so liberally plied, they allowed me to complete my cutting out expedition with this result:

These rather boyish pranks broke the tension of nine long sailing sessions of day or night in which we have battled and raced. Although we did not win our class of ‘Classics’ (defined as more than 30 years old), we did gain second prize and several thirds. In our class there was also a graceful old pilot cutter on which I had the privilege of visiting in Penang.

Back to the classroom nest week after this gruelling effort as the navigator. No more sailing for seven days!

Time and tide waiteth for no man, the good book says, but it is a fact that the restless currents of that large part of the sea that is affected by tides does have, twice a day, a brief time of stasis. It must be so for the flow of water reverses after the outflowing tide has reached its lower limit, and again when the inflow reaches its upper limit.

Seated at dusk on a high deck of the Royal Lankawi Yacht Club, after a hard day of harbour racing, I have just experienced such a moment, in the inward tidal flow which mirrors, reflects, and refracts the outer world. Like all days, this day of mine has been preceded by other days. Immediately before there had been a night passage from Penang, some 60 nautical miles to the south, and that was preceded by a daylight voayage from Pankor, an island farther south, and that in turn was preceded by the race from Port Klang.

During the whole of these passages, which now are logged by the ship’s instruments as more that 500 Nautical Miles, I have acted as the Navigator, while my colleague at the Day Skipper stage has acted as Chief Mate in charge of the deck.

The constant use of charts and the tools for processing them, the buffeting of shrewd questions by the instructor, the sheer amount of repetition, has entered my soul more effectively, more insinuatingly that the wood of my desk in the diesel factory where I laboured faithfully for the ten years before joining this course. I am well on the way to being able to identify myself as a person learning to sail rather than by using my erstwhile cloak of calling myself a tchnical author.

Something else is happening to me, I suspect as a result of the intensity of this experience. It is that instead of being my usual old bundle of nerves, I am beginning, just beginning to accept a part of the rhythm of the sea into my life. It is a Zen moment. Self is far less importatnt than the current undersea picking my bones in whispers.

Yes, I can feel it. I am surrendering myself for a moment to the element by which and on which I am currently living. My own continuation becomes of microscopic unimportance. Instread, for a moment i have regained a wonderful balance, as I rise and fall, entering the whirlpool. I have not yet forgot the cry of gulls and the deep sea swell. But I am passing the stages of my age and youth as I turn the wheel and look to windward.

But what is this? A new current is emerging. The high water mark has been passed and using the rule of twelfths we can roughly calculate the strength of the flow down to low water, where another period of stasis will inevitably occur.

This is as long as the moon continues to rotate above the earth, and so as far as my little life is concened, I am touching eternity here. It is making me a better person for the present, one who is less inclined to compromise to lies, one that is more inclined to publish and be damned.

Here I am in a snap taken at Straits Quay in Penang, a place visited now so often as to make it almost a home port.

Enduring a typhoon even in a full-powered steamship can be life-changing, but in my case I regret to admit, it inspired one of the more boastful claims I have made about seasickness these last forty years and more.

First I would explain how the bows of ss Canberra were light because the arrangement of the engines was aft to maximise passenger space. As she was the first large liner with this design, the naval architects had been forced to remove some weighty features from the after end including a circular marble staircase. When I had sufficiently impressed my audience with the extent of my arcane knowledge I would, in leisurely fashion, describe the typhoon which raged forty years back in the Cook Strait and northern Tasman sea. The deck dept had made an unsuccessful attempt to steer round the monster, but in had veered unpredictably, like a Texan steer, as is the way with typhoons.

Showing a surprising (and quite unjustified) satisfaction with my story-telling capacity, I would go on to say that after working for eighteen hours without rest I had taken a brief nap in my bunk which happened to be the uppermost in a tier of two. Being at the time a CPO, as ‘otherr ranks’, or as we say more properly within the naval context, as a ‘rating’, I was berthed in the forepeak, where the light bows would rear and shudder very much like the maddened cow I mentioned. Waking suddenly and consulting my watch, I found I was in danger of being late ‘turning to’, as we say. Mistiming my leap from the bunk, my feet met the deck more quickly than I expected. The sudden strain on my legs from the rising ship was that of a much heavier man than I then was (though perhaps not than I am now). On landing i tensed up and immediately felt seasick for a moment, the only moment, as I bragged, that such a thing had ever happened to me. That is, until now.

This new occasion was not far off Port Klang. For the whole of the previous day I had lain in bed with a tummy bug or infection of the bowels serious enough for the doctor to prescribe anti-biotics. At one time I had felt so weak and feverish that my contnuation of the programme was briefly in doubt. Now I was recovering, though I was still almost as weak as a kitten. We now experienced the most confused and lumpy sea that I can remember, and Kay Sira’s motion was not happy. For some time I sat in the slatted seat in the open at the stern, trying to look at the horizon, and twice I tasted the horrible iron bile rising almost into my mouth, but not quite. I began to suffer and to consider the action of some guests I have heard of at Chinese feasts who eat their fill severel times over by deliberate digital voiding between sessions.

But no, it passed and my stomach settled. and here I am, a self-portrait in the cabin of an old pilot boat called Eveline, who is in our regatta.

I am fully recovered, I did not leave the ship. My navigation has been commended by the instructor who asked me to go up to the dais at the prize-giving presentations to collect the second prize of the day.

I am immensely proud. I have seen and suffered the sea. I have employed the tools of this trade – portland plotter and dividers, to mark the charts with the compass bearings of our planned course, and for many days those plans have been followed in and out of ports and anchorages until I have brought the ship nigh on 400 miles even unto the present day!

There is so much to say, but alas I cannot stay up longer to describe it now. I just hope I shall not forget what I have done and learned so that I can report it as soon as I have leisure in which to do it.

Meanwhile, like Gilbert & Sullivan’s Ruler of the Queen’s Navy, I can still claim never to have been sick at sea.

Not ever?

No, not ever.

Not never?

Well hardly ever….

Excitement builds as the Royal Malaysian Yacht Club prepares for its greatest annual event – the Raja Muda Regatta – in which we too take part! Races are held from here, the estuary of the Klang northwards to Pangkor, and then to Penang where we race around the harbour, finally to Lankawi, where we finish at the school’s home port.

I have been assigned to my duty and it is an exceptionally exacting one. Both the available Day Skippers – Richard (Mr Brash) and me will stay in Kay Sira, he to manage the deck, I to act as navigator – while Principal Instructor Barry serves as Captain.

Later today I hope to collect the Sailing Instructions for Kay Sira, which I must study with the greatest care. Then I must pore over charts and develop as comprehensive a knowledge of the waters in which we shall race as I possibly can. At all times I must be aware of the effect of the tide on our courses, and the effect of the wind direction and strength. I will also help Richard when required, but at other times I shall sit in solitary splendour on the poop, ready to answer questions posed by the skipper, and shall periodically disappear down the after companion way to work at the chart table.

During yesterday’s pilotage up the Klang I got a hint of how it might be. Kay Sira was the last of the three boats to enter the estuary, but arrived at the offing of the Yacht Club first. It was terribly exciting as we raced just outside the buoyed channel, allowing us to ignore the  big ships passing.

As we passed by the other two, I was able to exercise the giant telephoto lens I am always banging on about!

Here is an action shot.

This is Sadé, the third of the school’s boats.  And here is a shot of Aeolus, my old home for the week after the first classroom part of the course.

I expect the next phase to be full of these exercises of skill!

Passing with the grace and silence of a sailing boat, under the dome of the stars, is a prescription for humility and pride. Those lights seen by the ancients we now know are not lamps just out of our reach but indicators of an immense universe in which the part played by our entire species is infinitesimally small. Yet in this vastness every creature has her place. In that night passage these eyes look at light that started its journey far earlier than the first sedimentary rocks were laid down on our little planet. The same eyes see the ghostly lights of passing ships on every course, and sometimes pick out the crests of the wavelets.

Seeming to address the outer scene we also look inwards into a similar immensity that even in the most balanced individuals barely affords a small window that is under command. One of the products of this immense engine that runs in me and in earlier men, is the means of transporting ourselves safely across the inhospitable seas and oceans of this tiny world. They seem so immense when we are separated by a few thousand miles from our loved ones.

Chatting comfortably with my instructor, who was my watch mate on this leg, we had already discovered that we had briefly attended the same school, and we comfortably exchanged the small matters of memory and the events of the recent days. It was a moment out of time as we whiled away the watch, wearing our life jackets as is mandatory at night.

I was acting as the skipper during this 90 mile journey down the Malacca Straits from the island of Pangkor to the mouth of the river Klang. Thoughts of my neglected pilotage duties up that busy river were banished temporarily as Kay Sira ate the night. We set and shook out a reef when the night darkened with anger, but the storm passed us by without a drop of rain or a gust of wind.

I was send up to shake out the reef but I did not clip on. I knew that I would always have one hand for the ship and one for myself. I become more and more familiar with the ropes, winches and strong points, so all parts of the boat become extensions of my own body, in a delightful symbiosis.

My companion suggested that it would be impossible to capture that evening’s experience in words as the brimming seconds of the wonderful darkness expired as easily as each whispering eddy that momentarily rolled under the boat. Of course it is so, and all that I can do is seek a means of creating within you that symphony and song. The gentle movement of the boat stabilised by wind cannot be captured in words directly. The sense of its driving through the element powered by well-set sails is, I think, only available as a feeling in the hands and heart for some men, while for others, like John Milton’s sight, comfort from the source is quite shut out.

The deep delight of the night passage is soon put to sleep on the surface of the main as dawn insinuates it earliest prodromal enlightenment of the highest clouds. If by my words you can see with inner eyes the peace, the calm, the vastness, and the small things of comfort such as a fleece worn against the unexpected chill of the tropical night, then I will not have striven in vain.

In the morning I turned on my computer to read a shocking communication from a dear friend. I will quote it verbatim.

Hi Austen

We had some dreadful news. Hany had just returned from a sailing trip around turkey, he then bought a small sailing boat and sailed out of Poole harbour on the way to Hayling island. The boat was later found engine running, beached. Hany was found 4 days later, he had drowned, no lifebelt.

I just remember the time you and he spent time on a Saturday trying to help my business, and realise so much that time is precious… let us know how you are getting on. Wear a life jacket

Love Michael

Of course I know how easily the safe and snug ballroom of the stars that we had enjoyed could become the scene of accident and death. All that we can do, as inheritors of the long-held skills, practices, and rituals of the sea, is to take all the precautions that we can, but never to give up that precarious life between wind and water, distorted by the rythym of  the tides.

Known as the ‘pearl of the orient’, the island of Penang is separated from mainland Malaysia by a channel about 3 miles wide at its narrowest point. The main channel is the northern one, Selat Utara, and this is the one by which we had entered in Aeolus after the landfall at Kedah Peak.

Two days later, much of which was spent in sleep, I changed back to Kay Sira for the next passage some 85 nautical miles down the coast to the South, to a place called Lumut, which I had visited in my youth, for it is the departure point for ferries to the small island of Pangkor, which was then, and still is a holiday resort known for its clear waters and coral.

On this, the first leg of our two-leg journey to join the Raja Muda Regatta at Port Klang, there were 2 newly-qualified Day Skippers and the instructor asked us to share control, and my leg is next. For the leg in which i was not practicing as skipper, I was asked to prepare the Pilotage for the voyage, which is needed to convey the boat from harbour to clear open water. It is necessary to prepare a route using charts, tide tables, and almanac, and to take control under the skipper for that part of the voyage.

I found the first part of the pilotage to be well within my growing capability, with the number of potentially catastrophic silly mistakes fewer in number than before. I conned Kay Sira through the suspension part of two huge road bridges at the southern end of the island, one of which is still under construction.

The limits of the local chart were reached after the site of the second bridge, the newer one, which is not shown on it. I had thought that this was the end of my Pilotage, but no, it was necessary to move to a smaller scale chart for the last part of the pilotage, eventually to arrive at the ‘Safe Water Mark’.

We arrived at this transition at the same time as darkness, and so I had to scrabble together a pilotage plan from nothing tp cover the last 7 miles. It was hairy and my inadequate knowledge of the night lighting and day marking of the various buoys seemed to be holding us back.

However with the patient help of the instructor (Barry this time) I muddled through and revealed that I need to learn up these facts by rote.

I had thought that I could not possibly endure a passage of longer than the 60 miles from Lankawi to Penang, but here I am after 85, and still writing. But I lost 6 hours of sleep via the watch system so must now rest and face the next leg later…

Authority afloat emanates outwards from self like the relationship of tree trunk through boughs to twigs and foliage. If the trunk is sound the rest of the tree can thrive, as the material of the ship and its crew can be nurtured and controlled by the skipper. As from the sub-conscious, there is a ground source of sustenance in the skipper from which the sap arises. It feeds the limbs and leaves, enabling their reciprocal contribution; the employment of the cunning that drives the ship safely and quickly to landfall.

My first short spells of command were assigned whilst cruising in Lankawi waters. We pootled about and found a safe anchorage one night hard against an island with a face. Here is part of the general setting, in a tiny jungle-covered archipelago offering shelter from the expected North-East winds; although contrary winds can blow.

Rejecting a hollow island in this group that houses a million bats, it was the weathered face of this one where the snuggest spot was found.

Next morning I had to plan my first tiny voyage from here through a narrow and difficult sound to a depth line from which my opposite number training like me for RYA Day Skipper could take over.

There were so many things happening at once. My uncertain navigation skills tottered on their legs like a new-born calf. The extra responsibility for ship and crew on passage on these inshore waters of danger was crushing and I felt the full weight of it as I desperately tried to answer the well-placed questions posed by the instructor.

“On which side is the safe depth of water?”

“How do you know when to turn?”

Causing a safe and a good course to be steered is initially an effort of will that created within me such a heat of anxiety that I held back a torrent of blind words that threatened to   outflow like lave from a tortured volcanic cone.

I managed this, with the help and guidance of the instructor, and on reflection I was already beginning to need that essential humility without which no man can call himself a seaman. A humility that accepts the ignorance of complete information and honestly acknowledges it.

This process of commanding brings intense delight, yet is full of fears. The next morning we  continued our practice in the broad waters of Bass Harbour, where our sister ship, beloved Kay Sira. often flaunted herself majestically, like this.

I hope I have explained that this week I have been assigned to Aeolus the second of the three school boats in which I have served.

Slipping our moorings that same night at 11pm, after an afternoon reset at the marina, we sailed for Penang, 60 miles south, after a violent rainstorm.

I took command at the historic landfall known to the ancient Indian sailors seeking forest products in exchange for cloth and iron tools, the mighty Kedah Peak (Malay: Gunong Jerai).

I have waited all my life to make this landfall. This mountain broods over the Penang of my youth. Its face, subtly changed in aspect as seen from my childhood home, was captured in oils by my mother and now hangs in my office at home with a rejected study unfinished below.

And now I was using the wireless masts at the peak as a component of an excellent three-point fix, the first in which I had full confidence. In the seas below there are four islands, nicely angled, laying the navigator’s task out for him as an excellent butler disposes a table for dining. In the shot above you can just see the edge of one of these: Pulau Bunting. Here is the massif of the Gunong taken with the telephoto lens.

And here is another of the islands, Pulau Telor (Malay: Egg Island), ditto.

There was still over a third of our voyage to go. I went off watch and rested, only to be told when I emerged again, by a grey-faced instructor (he had hardly slept at all because his skippers were so new):

“I am feeling unwell. I must go and lie down, will you take command?”

It was like a body blow. I gulped and nodded, and after a glance all round the horizon, I rushed below to establish our position exactly, using GPS for the first time (in sorrow rather than in anger). When I had determined this, and with some satisfaction concluded that I did indeed know where we were. I could confirm the GPS by bearings on Gunong Jerai, a convenient island in that chain, and the south eastern headland of Penang itself.

I was surprised to see Simon our instructor still quietly sitting in his favourite place with his back on the man-overboard kit. And then it dawned on me: it was a trick and I had been fooled! Good lesson! I had done the right thing.

Bringing the ship into the know waters of Penang roads revealed the excresence of high rise building new from my youth.

And now my greatest failure to date occurred. Willingly relinquishing command for entering the Straits Quay Marina (a picture of which forms one of the banners of this blog), I was ordered to drop the mainsail, and I asked another crew member to assist me. I tried to  explain how to do the ‘flaking’ procedure which folds the sail in loops over the boom to the colleague, but either due to failure to make myself clear, or perhaps due to a deliberate sabotage, his end of the operation was sloppy, messy, and insecure. His end of the sail was all ruckled and his ties so loose that all the flakes collapsed in a heap on one side of the boom. Running backwards in my temper I pulled up one of his ties and shouted:

“Look at this – loose as a girl’s knickers! Get this tightened up you bugger! Look! Like this!”

The poor man, loaded with his own particular incidental pains, was all fingers and thumbs and I became at that instant his mortal enemy. I had utterly failed in the human relations department, and the heady wine of my new-found pretensions to be a skipper turned to a sour and undrinkable corkage. ‘I will never be able to take command’, was my over-reactive thought, for I will always be undone by my anxiety so that I cannot inspire people to follow me. My fifty years of seamanship in small boats, my new found navigation skills are all as nothing if I can only, like Captain Bligh, excite the hatred of my fellow man, turning his joy to mutiny, his effort to dumb insolence, and his aspiration to failure.

Ach, it was a bitter blow for the new skipper, and the fall from grace magnified. It was not quite like that imagined by Milton:

‘Nine days he fell, from dawn to dewy eve’

But nonetheless I arrived at my ‘own place’ in hell, at ‘bottomless perdition, there to dwell in adamantine chains and penal fire’. Needless to say, this was somewhat over-dramatic. In this morning’s light i can look into the mirror and take command of that main force from which the skipper’s gentle and humble exercise of power begins, the quiet centre of the soul, wherein lies the self, ineradicable except by death.

‘I was lost, but now am found’, I hummed to myself  following the class room training in chart work. The next step of this intensive course gives the opportunity to practice these lately-learned skills in the real world.

Under the watchful eye of the instructor, we had to play the role of skipper, in turn with our fellow students. This additional dimension adds another strand to the learning process, but the greatest difficulties I experienced were

• Moving from seascape to chart and back 
  It’s essential to know exactly where you are and then to read the dangers of the sea bottom over which the boat will pass
• Relating compass courses and bearings to direction in the real world 
  After the need to know where you are we need continue monitoring the exact place(s) which we expect to arrive at soon.

Once I have cracked these I can start calling myself a navigator; it’s as simple as that. The first step is to make a passage plan flexible enough to stand the unexpected circumstances that are certain to crop up. Getting this right does not require excessive brain power, more a dogged determination to follow a process which will assure the accracy of position and course.

Several times I have been let down by my inability to relate compass bearings (numbers in the range 0-360) to direction, so I have no inbuilt sanity check. For example when progressing from North to South I calculated a course alteration to 355º without thinking that of course this number is nearly 360 so would mean going back towards the north instead of making a small alteration from an existing southward course of 160º.

I don’t think I will make that mistake again, but there are so many pitfalls that at times this week I did begin to have self-doubts. But more of these in my next post.

Meanwhile here is a shot taken with the monster ‘boy toy’ telephoto of Kay Sira. This week I have served in Aeolus, a 37 foot Beneteau-built yacht, with our landside instructor, Simon, as skipper, so I was able catch a few pictures of Kay Sira as we passed each other in the breezy waters of the Bass Harbour roads off Kuah, the capital town of the favoured island of Lankawi.

I have received a request to post this photo, so here it is, warts and all.

Sunday at Royal Lankawi YC Marina started quietly enough. The first ritual out of the boat is the wash house, which is at least 200 yards away on the shore. Forgetting my wash bag I  was faced with a considerable round trip to retrieve it. However, having dispensed with shaving 2 weeks ago, and now that my athlete’s foot has been zapped, the only thing I really need is soap.

So instead of the dual trek, I filled my left hand with liquid soap from the dispenser at the washbasins and still had enough left when I had begun to sluice myself to do the business.

I’m getting pretty relaxed….