bikini v non bikini
A perspective that only age and a certain wisdom can provide…
Thanks to Rule 69 for letting us republish this great article by Brian Hancock. Its sentiments resonate strongly with me, and hopefully will do with a few of our readers. There is wisdom here!
A few weeks ago I wrote a piece for Rule 69 bemoaning the growing number of internet Influencers (whatever they are) that have decided that sailing is their medium and an ocean crossing, live streamed, might be in their future. Needless to say I was against them as much as I like young, beautiful women prancing on the foredeck in a carefully chosen ‘see some but not all’ bikini.
Call me old, or at least old fashioned, but I have been around this game long enough to know what I like and what I like can be summed up by two stories; one new and one old, as in very old. This is Part 1- New.
The first one caught my eye. A young couple tied the knot on a full circumnavigation. Good start, but that’s been done before by all types of people in all kinds of boats. What they did differently was to capture the simplicity and essence of what it means to pare down your life, leave your precious belongings ashore and get on with it. By the way, when people ask me what’s the hardest thing about a circumnavigation, the answer is always the same. “Throwing the docklines ashore.” This is where many dreams stall and often fail. You have to leave the dock.
In 2015 Christophe Mora bought a boat. He knew what he wanted. For a start he wanted something that he could afford knowing full well that cost increases exponentially by the foot. A 40-foot boat is a lot more expensive to run and maintain than a 30-foot boat so he settled on a 25-foot boat; the Django 770. The boat had a twin keel which made it easy for beaching and allowed them to do bottom work without needing a boatyard to haul.
He met his girlfriend Carina Juhhova in Patagonia where she was working at the Cape Horn Tourist Information office in Puerto Williams. Puerto Williams, by the way, is the southernmost town in the world. As an aside I might add that I have spent a lot of time in Puerto Williams and hiked the surrounding mountains, some of which are high enough to allow a spectacular view of Cape Horn on a clear day, but I digress.
Working on the time honored philosophy that if something can break or go wrong it probably will, but if you don’t own it or have it, it’s not your problem. Their motto was ‘go small, go simple, go now’. They pared things down starting with that most important part of everyone’s daily routine; the head. They skipped it in favor of the time proven system of ‘bucket and chuckit.’ Anyone that sets sail across an ocean with just a bucket and a good place to brace is my kind of sailor. I do, however, draw the line at using the same bucket to wash the dishes.
They also ditched the refrigerator and opted for a bucket over the side shower. Not sure which bucket they used. They also had a spray bottle. The interior was simple. A V-berth, a galley with a two burner stove, a small nav station and a pot, a pressure cooker, a kettle, three plates, three bowls and three cups. When Carina moved onboard she added a teapot and yogurt maker. There was no heater and no inboard engine. Just an outboard when they needed it and warm layers to keep out the cold. Cristophe viewed the boat as a base camp for adventures and not as a floating home.
Christophe and Carina set off from Patagonia. Their goal was not to entertain an imaginary and unseen audience with their exploits by posting and streaming. Rather it was to notice as much as they could cram into their heads along the way. Because their boat, named L’Envol, had an average cruising speed of 5.5 knots they didn’t fly past a pod of whales playing and spouting up some fjord. They stopped to watch. They didn’t have any place to be; they were already there. They were living a beautiful life and looking at everything along the way with some wonder and gratitude in their hearts.
They tied the knot on their circumnavigation by crossing their outbound track off the coast of Brazil. They had done what they had set out to do and they had done a heck of a lot more. It took years. They would celebrate in France when they returned there a year later. Christophe and Carina documented their experiences in a small box in their brains labeled ‘experiences.’ They were not spending their time buggering around trying to find a wi-fi connection in some distant harbor in Thailand. Instead they went snorkeling. They were not trudging in the heat to find an Internet cafe that worked some of the time but also sold cokes in case you got thirsty while waiting when (inevitably) the Internet went down. Instead they took a nap and woke to see a stretch of water turning pink as the sun set spluttering and sizzling into the ocean at end the day.
Let me, if I may, point out a couple of observations of my own. I once sailed solo across the North Atlantic. One evening, around midway, I had an epiphany (there’s a big word coming from a small sailor). I was sitting and watching the sunset. I had checked my radar and there was no other vessel within 20 miles. I was alone and at that moment I was the only person on this planet that witnessed that actual sunset. Not a single soul other than me got to see it. Talk about special moments.
Second point. On my first circumnavigation, back when Jimmy Carter was President, over the course of nine months and 27,000 miles all I got to see was the men’s bathroom in Cape Town, another in Auckland and another in Mar del Plata, Argentina. I also saw the inside of a few waterfront bars and enjoyed the odd taxi ride to find the local chandlery. Other than miles of blue (and sometimes gray) ocean that stretched endlessly out ahead of us, that was about it. We sailed past so many remote and spectacular places but had no time to stop and say hello, and to make matters worse, I did the same thing again four years later.
I have a few carousels of slides from that trip. I also have some faded letters that I got from my girlfriend including one where she dumped me in favor of the fat kid that grew up two blocks from me. That’s about it. Nothing etched permanently on a hard drive or forever on YouTube or Instagram. I consider myself lucky. It’s all there in my brain and there it will remain until that pile of gray mush starts to fade with age.
I urge you to slow things down a little and notice the kids playing soccer with a ball made from scrunched up newspaper taped together, and then notice the big smiles on their faces. One thing that I have learned along the way is how little we need to be happy; not how much. I am pretty sure that Christophe and Carina figured that out a long time ago.