The Collaborative Art of Circumnavigating

Day 3 : Ascension Island to Azores

Sunday, March 20th 2022

(A special shout out to our friend Brad in WA, without whose email this morning about Aboriginal Art Month at the WA Art Gallery, the following thoughts might never have occurred to me).

If you read yesterday’s blog and then looked at our track on the PredictWind tracker this morning, you’ll know two things, already.

The first is that we clearly paid heed to PredictWind’s advice and put a gybe in, as we’re now sailing in quite the wrong direction for where we ultimately want to go.

The second is that PredictWind is quite clearly a lot smarter than we are, because our speed immediately shot up by 2 knots, and is now more than 4 knots higher than we were sailing previously. Not only are we sailing a faster angle, but we’re in a lot more wind.

In fact, by making this course change, we’ve added over 100 nautical miles to the trip, but my initial calculation when our speed jumped from 4 to 6 knots was that we were going to save 17 hours. Now that we’re sailing at 7 or 8 knots, it’s more like 24-36 hours that we’re saving.

The other implication of this is that we are now converging on the paths being sailed by many of our friends who were in St Helena, and who are now en route to Fernando de Noronha, an island off the coast of Brazil favoured by cruisers on their way to the Caribbean as a good place to break the journey.

(On the PredictWind Offshore app, we can follow the tracks of friends’ boats even while we’re offshore without normal internet. They are all plotted on the screen together, and it’s like a cool artwork seeing all these tracks converging and diverging).

We’ll be gybing back to the North later this evening, and our paths will diverge again, but not before we possibly get the chance to spot someone on AIS, and maybe even have a chat on the VHF.

One of the downsides of our decision to head up to Europe is we’re leaving behind so many of the friends we’ve made along the way on our journey so far. We’ll make new friends of course, and hopefully find the old ones in an anchorage on the other side of the world in a few year’s time. But in the meantime, this diversion and convergence today, in conjunction with Brad’s email, got me thinking about an aspect of meeting these other cruisers that I’d hitherto underappreciated.

If part of why we’re cruising is to find some extra meaning in our life, then part of the role of other cruisers is to help shape our journey – both in terms of the knowledge that we all share with each other about our onward passages, but also the experiences we share when we explore together at each destination.

In that sense, our circumnavigation is a collaborative artwork. Art because we’re extracting and interpreting meaning from the world around us in a (somewhat) creative endeavour. And collaborative because without those other cruisers, the experience we have and the meaning we take, would be entirely different.

This was reinforced for me by reading our friends Chris and Jen on S/V Skylark’s PredictWind tracker blog yesterday. They’re currently in Namibia, some 4 weeks behind us, and wrote yesterday about an anchorage in Hottentot Bay they’d just visited. We intended to stop there ourselves, but circumstance s conspired against us and we missed it out.

Not only did they had a fabulous time there, (you can find ether description at Skylark, and it’s worth a read), but they did so in the company of relatively new friends of theirs on S/V Whiskey Jack – a boat with whom we spent a lot of time in the Maldives and Seychelles. And it’s quite clear from the blog how central each other’s presence was to the whole experience (were we jealous reading about it? You bet we were!).

Part of why we’d intended to stop there (and I suspect informed Skylark’s choice too) was from watching the relevant episode from prominent You Tube Vloggers SV Delos, who stopped there 5 years ago, and made a very entertaining video about it .

Anyway, the point is, this is one massive collaborative art project we’re undertaking, finding and shaping meaning and pleasure together. And in that way, it’s not at all unlike Aboriginal Art, where (I learned today from Brad) many artworks are created collaboratively by up to 7 artists at a time in a shared interpretation of the world.

And if Blog writing can be considered a form of art in itself, then not only are the readers of this blog getting to enjoy reading about the fruits of collaboration among the cruisers we interact with, it turns out you can help shape the art itself simply by sending us interesting emails that get me thinking and over-interpreting at 6am as the sun rises in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and I sit down with a blank screen and a blank mind to write my daily blog.

Day 3 Statistics:

Time on passage so far: 2 days, 21 hours

Distance covered in last 25* hours: 157 nm
Average Speed in last 25 hours: 6.3 knots

Official Length of intended Route when we set out: 3,480 nm
Current Projected Distance to Go according to chart plotter: 3,227
Distance Sailed so Far: 366 nm

Total Projected Distance of Route: (3,227 + 366) 3,593

Change in total projected distance in last 24 hours: +113 miles (grew by 113 miles due to following PredictWind’s recommended course change). So basically, we sailed 157 miles on Day 3, but only got 44 miles closer to our destination!

*Number of hours in Day 3: 25 – we put our clocks back one hour to GMT-1 to better align sunrise/sunset to our watch system and body clocks and also because Azores is GMT -1 (perhaps the only place on earth on that time zone???)