The Slow Exhale
Words and pictures, Mark Chew
Entropy is the universe’s slow exhale: the tendency of all things to loosen, mingle, and reduce to their basic components.
A drop of black ink falls into a glass of water. At first it holds its dark shape. Then it unfurls into threads, the threads become clouds, and eventually the whole glass is the same grey tint. Nothing was destroyed. The ink is all still there. But it has wandered into so many possible arrangements that it will never find its way back to being a single drop. That wandering is entropy.
Just north of Mahón on the island of Menorca, there is a small but characterful village called Es Grau. Next to the carpark at the entrance to the settlement, there is a cemetery for dead boats. Not just wooden boats but discarded, unloved and unlovely plastic craft too. There is half a Hobie 14, balanced on top of a moss covered laser. There are a few small fishing put puts, with their engines in pieces. Small shoots of Sea Fennel seem to thrive in their bilges Each one of these craft was once new, filling its owner with the promise of adventure, or at least a basket full of white Seabream. And yet now, amongst these skeletons, there seems to be an acceptance that the slow loosening, mingling and scattering of their component pieces is OK.
In a more scientific sense, entropy measures how many different ways the tiny pieces of something (atoms, molecules) can be arranged while the thing still looks the same to us. Take a deck of cards. A perfectly sorted deck is just one arrangement. A shuffled-looking deck can be arranged in a staggering number of ways. Because there are so many more “messy” arrangements than “tidy” ones, a shuffle will almost always land you in a messy one. Nothing forces it; it’s just overwhelmingly likely. In a closed system, entropy tends to go up, never down. That’s why eggs break but don’t unbreak, and why time seems to have a direction.
As boat owners we have taken on the unenviable task of pushing back against entropy, in an environment that naturally encourages it; sun, salt, damp and warmth.
PARTRIDGE, a wooden gaff cutter built in 1885, is described as the oldest fully functioning classic racing yacht in the world. And it’s only 140 years old! Every yacht built before that time has either disappeared into the soup that entropy creates or been frozen in artificial “museum” limbo.
It’s quite liberating to accept, that as custodians of old craft, despite spending too much time and money pushing back against the universe’s slow exhale, we will lose the battle in the end!
But perhaps the good people of Es Grau gave up the fight too early!