Thursday day 6 continued

“Querk, querk” it sounded and you heard air getting blown out of the sea. It was just a big flock of dolphins checking the boat out. They stayed for about 15 minutes, playing way too energetically around the boat, just listening to them made me feel exhausted. I didn’t know dolphins were up this far north.

So they left, and later on there were no wind and no fog, but still imposing darkness. The engine worked relentless into the no nothing darkness. Again I looked at waters. How much stuff can you possibly see out here? It is just water. More dolphins? That’s like old news. But still I decided to stare at the darkness to starboard, and think of Krishnamurti again, half meditating.

 

I went down for a snack, and when I came up again, the sea on starboard was strange. Slowly it started making flashes from underneath the surface somehow.  Very quick flashes, like camera flashes just bright green. Pretty much the whole sea was flashing and flashing. I thought about some UFO movie, I saw. I woke Bill up and asked him if he knew what it was. I felt it was pretty surreal. Sleepily he muttered it just was algae and went back to sleep without looking. Well, it couldn’t be a bio-fluorescent whale, because it was too big. I looked hard and long at the flashing, some flashes were in focus, and I could see it was just ordinary 10” jellyfish. I didn’t know jellyfish would fire quick flashes in the night. I guess they do it to attract algae. Pretty soon the concentration of jellyfish was gone, but now, since I knew what to look for, I could see single jellyfish fire off their millisecond glow.

It was a dark dark night...

 

Friday Day 7

Morning would come. Brice would be at the wheel eagerly checking out the radar thanks to sea smoke everywhere. He would eagerly be trying to find a tiny dot on the radar screen. For a man with a blind eye, he was doing pretty good,  I am not sure I would even have noticed it. His frustration clearly showing, I went on the foredeck trying to see what it could be. After a while we found a tiny green fish buoy.

We had seemingly lost most of our water, well, the water tank gauge showed we had less than an 1/8 left. It didn’t make sense, and we figured the heavy weather on Wednesday maybe caused the tank to leak somehow. Paula ignored it, and took a shower anyway. It was strange, but we had 2 4 gallon containers, so we wouldn’t be out of potable water anytime soon.

 

Everybody got up, the seas were flat and finally we got some sun. A kid’s balloon with a colorful image came floating by, it was like a first sign we were near civilization again. Later a paper cup floated by. Bill wanted to land at Block Island, also known as “Bermuda of the North”, to fuel up. We still had about a quarter of a tank of diesel left. In the evening we started seeing navigational buoys and other sailboats for the first time in 3-4 days.  But no land. We couldn’t see anything even though Block Island was supposed to be just 1.5 miles away. It was evening, and although the visibility seemed good I guess the little sea smoke left made the Island invisible.

So we arrived at Block Island (no.7 on the map), luckily the only people around. Often Block Island is full of sailboats, but due to the weather and calendar luck, almost no-one were around. We moored to the main harbor dock, and had our first meal on shore in a week.

 

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