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.