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.