“Keep a journal…and stay away from pirates” was the advice of a dear friend, and so here I am learning to blog as I go. Only yesterday blogs were things I could read but not write, but the internet collapses wait time and amazingly just one day later I am making my first tentative steps. This is my second post, and already I can’t wait to see what it will look like when I upload it against the first one.

The title of the blog – seatrack – as I have already said refers to Churchill’s phrase about the difficulty of hunting the German pocket battleship Graf Spee in the ‘trackless ocean wastes’. And of course he was describing something he knew well for many times he like me had cast his eyes around the circle of the horizon without finding the tiniest spot of dry land, but only ‘water, water, everywhere, nor any a drop to drink’.

However we humans are contrary fellows – we are at one time both ‘angel forms’ and ‘poor bare forked creatures’. It is a fact that in this trackless waste my lifetime experience has been the most grounded. In this directionless mass I have found my best and truest directions. Trusting in this I return as a pilgrim, at the outset of my next chapter of life.

Although of course all life began in the sea, the curious ape you see in the mirror every morning cannot now live more than a few hours on it, unless supported by artificial flotation and shelter, and above all unless it can operate some method of locomotion. Of these methods by far the most harmonious is of course the employment of wind. By cunning we can borrow a little of its force to make our track in the waste, and come at last by design to the welcome lights of the home port.