Cape Farewell Greenland Voyage 2007

Hello to everybody back at home! Sorry I haven’t been in touch so far, but I’ve been struck down pretty bad by the seasickness. The ocean has been really rough for the last few days, and a lot of people on this boat seem to have been stripped right down to their most basic survival skills. Even putting on boots to go outside has been a really hard job. A lot of us seem to be more or less in bed all the time.

Today I had to leave my watch because I needed to vomit, but was asked to help lower a sail before I left…it’s still pretty choppy out at sea, and Beth (who I share my watch with, along with Dallas and Nick) and I had a lot of trouble completing this task. Beth fell down and got soaked by a wave, and I took a bit of a smack to the side of the head. I came back in, made a sick, and had a little nap. Nice.

My days seem to have consisted mostly of trying to wake up in time for my watch; remembering to eat; trying not to throw up; and drinking plenty of water so I don’t get dehydrated. So far I’m failing on most fronts, which is a shame because the food is really great on here. I am remembering to drink water though, so that’s something at least. I’m keeping a smiling face about it all, and seem to be cracking a lot of bad jokes, so it can’t be that bad! Been doing an awful lot of slipping around the cabin. I think I damn near broke my coccyx yesterday slipping across the floor into a table.

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Plates, tins of Formaggio, crisps are falling around my head as I write this in the dinning room outside the galley. The past 36 hours have been grim, SW gale, cold driving wind and rain – the stockiness of our team amazes me and I am surprised I haven’t been lynched for subjecting them to such an ordeal. We have continued with our oceanography measurements and oddly lying in the purgatory of my bunk yesterday I envisioned how to make all this scientific visioning into a piece of art. It is difficult not just to illustrate the science but to somehow get across the poetry of this great Greenland Sea ‘tract’ they are conducting. Working this through in my studio on my return will be it’s test but I have been trying to find a way of working the science and art together and the forced prone position of my bunk mixed with endless agitation might have just cracked it.

We are all exhausted and each have found a unique way to suffer, Brian, healthy of body is suffering dark dreams and hallucinations, for Aminatu this place is foreign, the sea frightening and after her deserts she cannot comprehend the fact that the earth is 70% ocean – she is even looking forward to the calmness of ice.

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Sickness arrives. It has been ushered into the Noorderlicht by white horses galloping across the sea.

She’s a salty sea and an unforgiving one. Every swell pitches the boat into a violent two-stroke rise and fall. A pattern emerges–heavy tilt to the starboard, snap back to vertical-but while your body attempts to learn this new gravity, the rhythm is disrupted, punctuated by an irregular swell or as the ship’s course slips from true (which happens aplenty with our amateur helmspeople). It’s a scene that’s part slapstick comedy and part poorly produced disaster flick. Glasses careen through the Noorderlicht’s upstairs salon, bodies flop, benches overturn. A bell hanging above the bar shows us hanging about 25-degrees from horizontal. At times (check that-most of the time) it feels like an amusement park ride that doesn’t end.

I’ve managed to avoid the fate of many of my companions. Despite the persistent low-grade threat of ill that sits in my gut (much worse when in the boat’s lower interior level), I haven’t succumbed to any real high-grade sickness. I don’t know whether to credit the copious consumption of raw ginger, my cabin’s fortunate position towards the middle of the boat (meaning a mere 10 foot vertical drop between swells rather than the 20 foot or so plummet felt by those in cabins towards the bow), or simply good fortune and lucky genetics.

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Read Marcus’s Arctic diary on the daily telegraph travel website.
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Brian gets roped in to help sending web updates direct from the deck of the Noorderlicht, as we sail through the night in bad weather and strong winds. Big thanks to Iridium for help with our remote communications setup during the voyage.

More of the same, really.

(Well, not really, but the mere thought of composing-thoughts and words-wrenches my gut.  In fact, one of the oddest effects of life on the sea is how dumb one feels.  The way I figure it-a good 95-percent of one’s mind, that is normally free for thought and consideration, is now occupied by the most basic of actions, body movements that typically require only the subconscious.  As a result, we all become blabbering fools.  Well, for much of the time.  I for one have been ridiculously slaphappy, laughing at the dumbest of jokes, at fruit falling from a bowl and casting across the room, or at any of the dozens of remarkable falls by just about every crew member.)

So we’ll see how we’ll fill the time the next couple of days.  I spend the hours between watch wishing I could read the many great books aboard the boat, or the half-dozen plays I brought along, or that I could write something more considered than these half-minded  blog posts.  But I plead seastupidity (and a bit of sea sickness prevention, as I certainly don’t want to test my boundaries by spending too much time in front of small text, or a monitor, or a notebook).

Repesentative quote of the day:  “It really is about patience, isn’t t?  –Vikram on enduring this trip.