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title: "About a Sea Stray — Learning to Sail the Hard (and Free) Way"
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source: "https://medium.com/engage/about-a-sea-stray-learning-to-sail-the-hard-and-free-way-a7af089148d0"
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author:
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- "[[tara tari]]"
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published: 2024-10-18
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created: 2024-10-29
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description: "Travelogue sailing essay about an unconventional community experiment in the Caribbean sea, upwind voyage of 12 inexperienced sailors from Guatemala to Cuba"
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tags:
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- "clippings"
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---
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[
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](https://medium.com/@taratari?source=post_page---byline--a7af089148d0--------------------------------)
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[
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](https://medium.com/engage?source=post_page---byline--a7af089148d0--------------------------------)
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“No one is doing this,” Daeli told us on one of those early days. His voice could be heard over the sounds of a small port city in the evening. The motors of boats competed with overhead eighteen-wheelers to the symphony of Latin music, broadcast from open bars and populated private docks along the banks. And, as is characteristic of a night in Guatemala, the air echoed with the barking of distant dogs engaged in endless debate. But from where we were, sailing still in freshwater then on that floating hunk of fiberglass, the churning of the river rose above it all, black water sucked away below us.
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## What it means to sail upwind
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==We were attempting to cross beneath a bridge in a narrow stretch of river that connects the lake from which we had come to the sea for which we were headed. The problem was that the wind blew precisely from the direction where we wanted to go, and between the grand cement pillars that descended from the tall bridge, our course allowed a minimal margin of error.==
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Sem paddles the kayak into town while Max and Paul work on Utopie | All photos from the author’s portfolio and used with permission
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When sailing, you can angle anywhere except into the wind. If you steer too close to the wind, also known as entering the dreaded dead zone, somebody on your boat will scream “Accident!” as your sails luff and your speed plummets and you lose control of steering. In this circumstance you either save yourself in time, turning the wheel out of the wind while you maintain enough speed for the boat to obey, or you are forced to tack. Tack is the sailor’s term for turn, specifically such that the bow of the boat crosses through the wind, steering from one side of the dead zone to the other by passing right through. This requires various adjustments on board, notably changing which side the sails are on by pulling with frantic will on ropes wrapped around winches, hoping to gather the extent of the slack in time to precede the pressure of the wind’s upwind impact on loose fabric, to tighten the sails fully before the necessary strength becomes that which requires strained muscles and which wears down the soft skin of damp fingers and palms.
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So, approaching the bridge, we maneuvered relentlessly. We tacked left and right to try to fit ourselves through, coming up short and letting the wind push us back again, starting over. Challenge was not limited to the direction of the wind and the width of the passage; we were fighting the current, too, which emerged from the shallows on either side and dragged us backwards with the flow tide of distant sea water rising. The failures persisted for hours. The sun set and the dark swallowed the day, and still we angled upwind, caught some speed, twisted the wheel as far as it could go, watched the bow swing, paddled at the back, switched the sails, over and over.
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When we passed at last beneath the bridge, we arched our necks to watch the line of suspended highway move horizontal through the starry sky. We sailed then below red tuk tuk taxis speeding on asphalt and trucks carrying things like cows and the dismembered trunks of mortal trees, and we savored for a moment the precision of our labor, the success of our energy expended.
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“Some people sail their whole lives and never do what you all just did,” Daeli addressed us, nine crew members whose only common characteristic was a total lack of sailing experience, as we sat deflated and folding in on ourselves in the cockpit. Exhaustion preyed on limbs unaccustomed to this level of exertion and spirits yet lacking a sailor’s stamina. “They just turn on their motors and cruise right through.”
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Yelena, Max, Paul, and Josephine on the deck of Friend Ship in Lake Izabal
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Friend Ship–our twelve meter catamaran built in 1986 and navigating to this day with the same sails, now more patch than original nylon–has no motor. That is, in the most literal sense, what Daeli meant when he told us, *no one is doing this*. A motor means the ability to progress in dead wind, to control your speed steering up to a dock, to fight a strong current, to definitively avoid obstacles. Today the great majority of sailors opt for this added security. Daeli is an exception.
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I was first in contact with Daeli during the fall of the previous year when I was working as a housekeeper at a bed and breakfast in the west of Ireland and loathed my boss and got in my head the idea to sail far away. I found him on a website that connects budget travelers with volunteer opportunities all over the world. Daeli’s listing for a sailing community in the Caribbean, although admittedly a bit unconventional, intrigued me, and though I ended up a happy waitress in Ireland, I saved his details for a later date. He is a forty-some-year-old Frenchman and something of a sailing purist, a dissident of the new age, a loyalist to an obsolete art. I did not know this before I arrived, on something of a whim, on his catamaran in a murky residential mangrove in Guatemala because, at that time, I did not know anything about sailing at all.
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Sem journals and drinks cacao in the cockpit on Friend Ship at anchor
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I also did not know, that night anchored on the seaside of the Río Dulce bridge, whether that sentiment–*no one is doing this*, a sentiment that evoked little at the time but would, over the coming months, continue to fill with meaning as to eventually overflow–was intended to instill pride or doubt, excitement or fear. I felt none of these things.
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## The anchorage from hell and other dangerous decisions
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I felt real fear only three times in those four months. The first time I felt fear, the moon was full, and the feeling lasted no more than a minute. We were anchored in a deep-reaching inlet, surrounded by jungle vibrating with the constant call of howler monkeys, in a remote corner of Guatemala’s Lake Izabal when a *lancha* (motorboat) full of eight armed figures silhouetted in the moonlight approached out of dense darkness. We knew of the area only that it offered great opportunity to birdwatch by kayak in the cool marshes that branch off around the perimeter and also that Narcos operated in the ancient Mayan temple back beyond the biosphere reserve and the palm plantation that billowed gray fumes up into the towering mountain range across the inlet.
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Anchored in an inlet in Lake Izabal
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February was nearing its end, and Daeli had been teaching us to sail in the lake for just a week, but nearly a full moon cycle had run its course since I arrived on the catamaran for the first time. The events that led us to that fearful night in the lake began when, barely an hour before dark, I first found Friend Ship lodged in the shallow of a small cove near the city where a Guatemalan family cast a net from their canoe and three small boys bathed nude in the pooling tide out front of their stilted home. I shared this moment with two women whom I would come to consider dear friends; I had met Josephine in the room cramped with sixteen bunks in the hostel in the colonial city of Antigua a week prior and Yelena in the Río Dulce market where I found her ripping the leaves from the crowns of pineapples to test their ripeness only just before we boarded the *lancha* with our big backpacks.
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## The mold, the mess, the hydraulic cylinder piece
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Immediately upon removing the torn sheet of tarp that served in vain to shield the cabin of the abandoned boat from the rogue outdoors, we were accosted with the stench of mold erupting from the moist enclosure, burning our noses, salivating in our mouths, and making our heads feel faint and achy. We sifted through torn mattresses and wads of rope and assorted knickknacks with our shirts pulled up over our noses until, just after the sun set with headlamps illuminating our way, we assembled on deck the tent we found under planks of wood in a dusty corner of the cabin. It was missing pieces and slightly torn, and the pole was split in the middle, so in the end, it stood half on its own and half leaning clamped against the railings that border the deck. We draped the corner of a sail across the top of our leaky tent, and a floating fort emerged, much like the sort of shelter children might piece together on a living room floor, except not, because we were three women–strangers as of yet–constructing not for amusement so much as necessity, to provide defense against swampy surroundings and the temperamental clouds sulking in blackness above.
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Yelena and Josephine on Friend Ship at anchor in the mangroves of Río Dulce
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The coming days combined into a collage of sickening chores and shameful adjustments to a lifestyle stripped of luxury. That meant kayaking out to the middle of the lake to bathe in water less exposed to the city’s toxic run-off and to fill buckets for dirty dishes waiting on the boat to be rinsed. It also meant relieving ourselves in the buggy mangroves or otherwise off the back of the boat after dark so as not to offend the neighbors. We spent the majority of our waking hours scrubbing dirt from the deck and mold from the cabin, both putrid and layered after half a year of neglect, left defenseless against encroaching tropics. We noticed, too, in the evening time that we were in the company of a mild cockroach infestation.
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When we completed the initial decontamination, tasks evolved to incorporate things organizational, resourceful, and mechanical. Josephine fronted the crisis in the kitchen, sorting and tossing various goodies like rusty cans of expired tomato puree and dry rice plagued by mites. Aside from making massive headway in killing the invading fungus by wiping white vinegar on the black corroded ceiling, walls, and floor, Yelena led town missions assigned to us by our absent captain–at that point known only as a faceless voice echoing vague instructions and impractical ideas from the speaker of a smartphone. Daeli directed us from afar as though each errand were a mysterious quest, giving us the names of people to ask for in the *tiendas* in town who might be interested in buying our broken battery and explaining how to find the *taller* where we could purchase a solar inverter based on the location of the man who sews shoes on the curb. While Yelena worked out where to buy anti-oxidation fluid and machine oil for half the market price, I pondered what to do with the large piece of mechanical equipment I had stuffed in my duffle bag between old clothes, camera gear, and cash hidden in various inconspicuous containers.
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Daeli shipped the hydraulic cylinder piece to my home address before I left because apparently the acquisition of miscellaneous marine products is streamlined in the United States. A man, the only crew besides Daeli with any sailing experience, came and left in the span of that first week. During his brief stay, he helped me install the cylinder to the tiller arm–which we found in a state of precarious decay–and the hydraulic hoses that pump pressurized liquid from the motion of the steering wheel, trading with me tools and interpretations of the manual, as I sat curled in the compartment flooded with oil at the back of the boat.
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Josephine on deck in the early morning at anchor in the mangroves on Friend Ship
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All this might sound unappealing, but at the same time, the morning fog fell such that the sun shone in thick beams of milky air, and everything outside our boat lent itself a shade of green in the light–the water a muddy green, the lily pads fluorescent, the foliage a sweet array of saturations. The only exceptions were the pink petals of the lilies and the stark white feathers of the heron that stood each day for an hour after dawn on the small wooden dock across the way, watching fish gather in the water around the wreckage of an aluminum vessel that now sprouted weeds and invited ivy to populate its surface of peeling paint. And anyways, several *lanchas* came a couple days later to transfer us to a marina where we waited for the rest of the crew and a local man worked to fill the leaks in all the windows and below some of the deck fittings with fiberglass, the residue of which made us itch on board and infiltrated the hammock that I hung from the mast to the boom to sleep at night. The work was never completed because, when Daeli arrived midday on the following Friday, he wasted less than an hour before he had us swapping Genoas (the large jibsail at the front of the boat) and pushing Friend Ship off the dock, the carpenter’s tools left out on his workbench by the boathouse with a message to let him know we would be back in town in a week or two to pick up his special mix of anti-slip paint and to pay the rest of the money we owed him.
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Canyon wall in Río Dulce
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That is how we ended up cornered in the lake that night by the men with the guns in the motorboat. We only knew about the cartel base because Daeli told us how, with a previous crew, he had been briefly captured and interrogated on Narcos soil after embarking on an overnight expedition through the untouched jungle, slicing with a machete his path through dense vegetation, to find a spring that he saw on a map on the other side of the ridge. Fear framed by Daeli’s anecdote dissipated when the boat neared enough for us to make out the matching camouflage uniforms and velcro badges signifying status of official national defense. The long sail to the base of the inlet where we sat anchored–protected from the elements but vulnerable to unwanted visitors–had proved our most challenging thus far with fierce and volatile winds, rapid consecutive tacks, and the first taste of the intensity that comes with real speed in an environment unforgiving of error. So we were very tired and extra relieved when the men turned out to be military. They asked Daeli some questions in Spanish and then advised us to avoid the other side of the inlet. When they finished inspecting each of our passports and sent warm wishes on their way, we wondered aloud whether their responsibilities involved protecting us from the illegal drug trafficking hub or the other way around.
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The second time I felt fear, I was eating ice cream in Belize on Easter Sunday. I had only just sat down on a washed-up log by the coast to enjoy the sounds of a city in celebration when I looked up to see Utopie in the shallows.
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## Friend ship to Utopie
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We picked up a nine-meter monohull when we returned to Río Dulce sometime in early March. The boat is named Utopie. It belongs to a friend of Daeli’s, a fellow Frenchman who had apparently made his way across the Atlantic to a tourist island in the Bahamas to fill his pockets working for a few months on the construction of luxury time-share condos. He traveled with another friend, the one who owned the three hundred kilograms of undeclared ceremonial cacao stored under the bed frame and foam mattresses where anywhere between three and five people slept at a given time in the back cabin on Friend Ship. The owner bought the boat half a decade ago with three other friends for five hundred euros each, and we were planning to drop Utopie off to him along our way, enjoying and repairing her ourselves in the meantime, though these plans did not materialize exactly.
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Daeli sent three of us to break onto the small black boat. We found Utopie in front of an overcrowded marina, her anchor stuck beneath sediment accumulated on the eroding riverbed, her chain tangled under polluted water from steel links twisting themselves into rusty knots, left for seven months to slow dance in place, spinning about a single axis as the wind and world kept moving around her. We rolled up the canvas covering the entryway and found the sails folded over some pillows and ratty cushions. Together we worked to raise the Genoa with dirty ropes and stiff rigging, and then we sailed slowly upwind against the current and out of the cove.
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“Utopie to Friendship,” and vice versa is what we would have said into the VHF if the radio system worked. The six second-hand batteries hooked up to the solar panels sometimes generated enough energy to charge a power bank or a speaker, but this system could not be reasonably relied upon either. So Utopie depended on Friend Ship; throughout our journey, the two generally traveled close enough that a waving flag, a blinking headlamp, or a thrashing of the arms up high could be seen as a signal, and when we came back close together, we could scream messages across raging waters or otherwise pass from one boat to another with a precise maneuver things like fresh cooked fried rice or portable chargers or even a crew member or two.
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Josephine watches as Max on Friend Ship passes food to Seba on Utopie
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At the time of the incident, we had managed to move both boats from the *río* to the sea and up the Caribbean coast of Central America to Dangriga, a city that tourist pamphlets call the cultural hub of Belize. This transfer involved more upwind sailing through thin channels, and we drifted the second half of the journey to Livingston–the last stop in Guatemala before the gulf–down the cold river that flows at the base of a great green canyon with our sails fully furled, riding out to sea on the current, progressing with the changing tide at the patient pace of nature.
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Yelena kayaks in the river between Lake Izabal and Livingston
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Sem watches from Friend Ship as an old woman and young boy fish from their *lancha* in Río Dulce
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We sailed inland from the cayes because we were due for a routine town trip. Town trips looked like a dozen *garrafónes* (twenty liter plastic jugs) shuttled to land on continuous kayak and dinghy trips and heavy loads of rice, oats, *frijoles* (refried beans in a bag), and fresh produce dangling in bright bags from the shoulders of us sweaty *gringos* as we shuffled manically through crowded markets. Dangriga was the anchorage from hell because of the shifting sandbanks, vast shallows, and treacherous exposure to winds and waves from the east. An indeterminate combination of these factors caused Utopie to drag two hundred meters at anchor toward shore until her keel lodged into a stubborn sandbar.
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We all felt very afraid, increasingly so as hours passed and the daytime died while we spit up saltwater and pruned from head to toe, standing in the sea where invisible jellyfish stung, pushing the boat back against the weight of all elements against us: the wind, the waves, the sweeping current. Two local fishermen helped us manually keel (tilt) the boat in the dark by tugging on a line we tied to the top of the mast. Consequent to the fishermen’s selfless endurance and some unearned stroke of celestial luck, Utopie was returned after an awful long time to anchor back in safe depths at Friend Ship’s side, having survived her brush with the seafloor.
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The third and final time I felt fear was in early April off the coast of Belize headed northeast toward Cuba. I was co-captaining Utopie because the official captain had taken a holiday on Friend Ship, basking in the relative indulgence of dry bed sheets, a stove that does not throw hot pans to the floor, a wind arrow that works, and a boat with two hulls that floats out at sea in a way that minimizes one’s urge to vomit. I had been sleeping as deep as the dead despite the aggressive lift and crash of Utopie sailing upwind over sea swells up to two meters when I heard my name called from the cockpit. I awoke cradled in the small triangular compartment at the nose of the cabin that we called the coffin. We called it this because even I could not fit my whole body laying flat and because the foam mattress was forever wet from the window that leaks with fervor sea from the ceiling.
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Below deck on Utopie
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“Tara,” he spoke, voice hoarse and drowned out. “Wake up.”
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I was up, stumbling with the motion of the waves, disoriented by the lingering trace of harsh sleep. An unusual sound–the sound of fabric flapping furiously in the wind–raised instant alarm. The Genoa tore, a huge gash that stretched a meter on either side of the clew (the lower corner of the sail where ropes are attached). The wind was strong; we were still moving fast, and the material ripped more with every hesitating moment. We knew we needed to lower the sail. We slowed, trying to steer into the wind with limited control, and pulled the Genoa down. Then we watched the meek white light that marked Friend Ship from the top of the mast move further and further into blackness, ignorant to our lights flashing on our mainsail, signifying an emergency. Utopie was ill-equipped for independence, and our friends on Friend Ship stranded us without any means of communication. That fact combined with the urgency of big winds approaching–for all we knew as soon as that following night–and the current dragging us against our will in the direction of a glowing cargo ship in the distance created an understanding of real danger, that feeling of fear.
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The knot in the red rope attached to the original Genoa refused to come undone even after having been soaked in seawater and jabbed with an old screwdriver. The only spare rope on the boat was frayed in bits and barely long enough to reach the cockpit on either end, such that when tacking, one must first pull with their hands before gaining enough slack to wrap around the winch. The wind continued to whip as Utopie crashed without control into steep waves in open sea, and we were finding it impossible to raise the spare Genoa. At first, it lifted with ease up the forestay, but then, with a third of the length left to go, it caught. The tallest of us tried at the bow to gather the loose sail together, hugging it as high as he could to reduce the pressure, as the partially raised sail spazzed with violence in the wind, begging to be set free. Despite all our strength and the will of our adrenaline, the rope refused to budge for almost an hour. The mainsail tore too, just as the sun arrived to dismiss the dark and I had finally managed, steering with the boom and the tiller rod together, to turn Utopie downwind, reducing the force of the wind acting against us. All three men pulled on the rope in unison, and in small increments, the Genoa climbed toward the top of the mast. From the cockpit I tightened it, attaching the rope portside, and all of a sudden our boat was back together. I could feel her moving the way I was used to. I kept on downwind, by now long abandoning any sense of our direction, while the men began to reef the main, folding the tare over to avoid any further damage.
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Sem sews a broken rope on Friend Ship
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We had a vague idea of where Friend Ship was headed–an island off Mexico called Cozumel where we could shelter from the coming storm and barter and beg at fancy marinas for desperately needed boat parts–and just enough phone charge to make it there with our nautical map. On the sail, we were silent as we shared a bowl burdened by depleting rations–leftover rice noodles garnished with soggy sardines from a can–until somebody said something about intensity. “I think real intensity is good for humans,” I remember my voice crafting the words. “Otherwise it becomes contrived, shoved into corners of life it does not belong.” In the early afternoon, we found Friend Ship surveying the harbor on the west of the island.
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## Wind reincarnated
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So with these few exceptions, the sailing did not scare me, but sometimes the sailing made me cry. On an otherwise unexceptional Tuesday in late February, for example, crossing from one side of Lake Izabal to the other, the light cooled with the air, and the golden hue of a day winding down evaporated into something softer. Everything in sight tinted with a powerful purple–the rippling water, the dwindling sky, the skin that held the body that marked my membership in it all–omitting only the glitter remnants trailing a swallowed sun and the shimmer that fell from the moon into a silver pool of water waving from the direction of the wind. With my arms and hands and fingers extended, I played with the wind at the bow of the boat like a child meeting her for the first time. I closed my eyes and felt the mighty force of her as she propelled us over the length of the lake. With my fingertips and face, the sensation and sound in my ears, the movement of loose hairs on my head, I found her; I knew where she was coming from. I looked at the horizon then and all the lines and shapes that emerge and morph in the fabric of the water, so quickly as to never have really existed at all, and I knew that there would always be this. I cried until the sea desaturated, and I made my peace with the chill of a night in black and white.
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Yelena and Josephine beneath the shades on Friend Ship in Lake Izabal
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When I cried, it was less often because of those things beautiful. It was more often because of rancid feelings that festered in my chest and made me fantasize about endings and escape. There were many moments when I cried and thought about leaving, like when we were out at sea and the wind died. Dead wind feels like forever, like stifling stillness is permanent, like the world is stuck on pause with the sun suspended indefinitely above–hotter and higher than ever before–like you will never live to taste another twilight, to delight in another dawn because there never will be one, because you and the rest of the living will succumb to circumstance and suffocate on this sick languor, because in the inescapable emptiness of sea, all is as good as dead as the wind.
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The lighthouse on Cayo Guaro del Este in Cuba
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The wind died on the last day of my last sail as we neared the channel to Cienfuegos. We departed an international dive site called *Las Tetas de Maria la Gorda* (the tits of Maria the fatty) on the southwest tip of the island a full two weeks earlier. For lack of leadership and insufficient forethought, we had sailed upwind across a distance of almost three hundred nautical miles, zigzagging the southern coast of Cuba. Besides one mission to refill water and kiss the precious earth of Cayo Largo and one night drinking rum with the lighthouse keeper on the last caye before the span of uninterrupted sea to the mainland, we had pressed straight on through the gulf. This final stretch saw my favorite sail–a solo night shift on Utopie with *la luna* half herself in the sky, lined up as my sole point of directional reference between the mast and the forestay–but overall the easterlies had humbled us. Worse, though, than the wind blowing from where you want to go is the wind not blowing at all.
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On that last day, the wind did not exist, and the boat would not heave to (when you position the sails and steering to halt the headway of your boat), so having collectively forfeit the helm, we spun in cruel circles. This made sustainable shade impossible as the sun surrounded us, running laps around our Utopie. The Genoa flapped in voluminous, swaying motions, and the boom echoed the harsh sound of metal moving against itself with the endless lift, tilt, fall of the boat. The blue waves continued rushing beneath, while body odor polluted breathing on the boat that day, and the sun showed her strength like she wanted to hurt me. I cried and could not speak. Utopie, so small, forbid my solitude. I sat at the bow and squinted into the bright abyss and felt the bumps and blemishes that littered my wilted skin, open wounds from exposed metal and the spines of a vengeful sea urchin that refused to heal for months on end in the salty dampness of life at sea. We were only a few nautical miles out from destination, two weeks of effort behind us, the end taunting in proximity. I felt vile, I felt hate, and I felt hints of lunacy. Had the wind shown any mercy, we would have been but an hour’s sail away. Instead we watched helpless as the coast moved about in circles, dizzy and with spirits shriveled up in the heat, a sad band of strays at sea.
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Crew gathered on the deck of Friend Ship
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When the wind returned we had great fun and forgot all about that. That last sail could have been a cumulative exam. We navigated Utopie through the curving channel at every point of sail possible, avoiding many obstacles like the green and red buoys that warn of where the river shoals and some fishermen in rowboats passing low by large commercial vessels. Friend Ship followed close behind, and we blew kisses at our crewmates, our team severed only by the small distance between two sailboats, as they gathered out on the deck amid colorful clothes dangling stiff from the railings and lines draped off the mast. We tacked, tightened, loosened, furled, unfurled our Genoa as the wind surged sporadic through the waterway. We had the main at once secured in the middle, in another instant open wide, restrained to the railing with a rope and a bowline. We attached the spinnaker pole, hoisting the Genoa opposite the main in a broad butterfly. From the helm, I thanked Utopie for giving me one last run downwind as we flew between tall jungle mountains and big buildings of incompatible architectural influences and private docks that revealed passing peeks into family restaurants and homes and some small city streets where vintage cars met horses and fuming motorcycles met men and women moving on foot. Approaching the marina, we battled a sudden current that sucked us dangerously close to a big steel buoy. Having avoided collision, at last I steered Utopie into the wind, furled the rest of the Genoa, and called to drop anchor. I realized then that my hands were shaking and that the space between my shoulder blades was sore, and I stood stunned for a moment in the sobering conclusion of my final sail. Soon the four of us on Utopie paddled the dinghy to Friend Ship where we reconvened and decided how to spend our day. It was by then once again only early afternoon.
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Utopie sailing upwind off the coast of Belize
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## The sea, sensitivity, and sacred surrender
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Sailing is an exercise in surrender. We see that when we are stuck sulking in the gulf, deserted by the wind. We see that also when we stick our faces in the Caribbean Sea, when sunbeams dance white from bottomless sapphire blue like the infinite out-reaching tentacles of a motherly creature somewhere in the depth of the earth. Toward the end of the trip, on intermission from filling *garrafónes* from a street tap in the tourist playground of downtown Cayo Largo, we took Utopie–nine of us crowded together on just nine meters of her–to moor at the big buoy out by the reef where the water crashes white and the coral grows like a wicked forest from the seafloor and the ocean flora rolls synchronized with the sea’s respiration. Just below the boat to the southeast, we found a wreck. It halted me to see, through plastic lenses floating up above, human infrastructure reclaimed, aluminum under siege, compelled to surrender to the sea grass weaving in and out of broken windows and walls dematerializing, metal stripped slowly of its man made form and given back to the world from which it was extracted, swarmed with schools of translucent fish and loose sand traveling on sea currents, the earth enclosing the sunken thing in her gradual and patient grasp.
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*Surreal is this life*, I remember thinking, when I shared that moment with a sea turtle. I had been investigating the surface of a pale purple coral head patterned with geometric grooves that resembled a sacred maze, a map of mysterious objective. I was floating there, held by the lure of nature’s hypnotic design, when the turtle swam up from the shadows. He paused for a moment, in experience of our animal encounter, before gliding away into the sea reef, and I thought for a long while about the manner of his mind. I thought about the forces which compel his decision, the impulses outside articulation that impose on him the will of movement and of life. The turtle’s divine presence seemed to, in a flash of fleeting clarity, project an impression of flow, to remind me of intuitions that guide the world of which us humans are estranged, to beckon me briefly into the indulgence of innate surrender.
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## Girls in havana
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I arrived at the airport in Havana two weeks later with exactly zero dollars and my flight information written on a sheet of dotted paper in my notebook. My mother booked it for me after I sent her a satellite message explaining how saltwater had corroded my phone, my debit card froze, and the so-called communist country of Cuba blocks most commercial websites even if I could borrow a device and find access to scarce government-operated internet.
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Ula and Yelena in the streets of Trinidad, Cuba
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The previous day, I took the taxi man on the street at his word that he would meet me in front of the grand theater at eight in the morning. It was just us girls in the city, and I spent the whole morning and afternoon with Yelena, wandering art galleries and dancing salsa in a bar *socialista*. Come night, I crawled into bed beside Josephine, sitting in my underwear on the clean hotel sheets of the Havana hotel room, the harsh Cuban cigarette in between my fingers put off by conversation unfolding of its own accord. I was trying to recognize the symptoms of failure and Josephine to diagnose the cause of it. “There was something fundamentally missing in this experience.” We were of the group not going back to the boats, flying away instead of forging on to Jamaica and then Colombia.
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“Community,” I responded, “is not easy.”
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The crew was full of extravagant personalities, seasoned travelers with stories from all corners of our fair planet, and so we made friends wherever we went. “*Llegamos en bote,*” we told immigration authorities and market vendors that we arrived by motorless sailboat, “*pura vela, sin motor*,” when we shared about our trip and asked for *discuentitas* on things like mooring fees and immense quantities of ground peanuts. More often than not, they found us more *loco* than sane, but it often helped fill with warm banter the distance between local and *extranjero*. We traveled rustic, spending each only five dollars a day on communal food, besides some legal charges and the occasional personal purchase of rum infused with ancient aphrodisiac herbs, honey harvested straight from the earth, cigars rolled in the kitchen of an *abuela cubana* at a tobacco *finca*, a domino game engraved by hand, or various other mementos that tempted budgets and depleted our dwindling cash supply. We enjoyed many moments and felt at times like family, but we also lacked congruence, the ten to twelve of us–some joined late, others left early–voyaging the Caribbean together on our two weathered sailboats. An experiment in equality resulted in an absence of authority, a disorganized crowdsourcing of decision, a friction that arose out of uphill communication. Plans were vague and often died like the wind and the swallow that landed on deck and lost its will to fly mid-migration out at sea. Josephine believes it was meant to be this way. She told me so in her solemnly wise way that commands my faith in her words.
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Yelena, Mana, and Sem spend time together in the cockpit on Friend Ship
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“It needed to be this way because, yes, it feels unsatisfying and in some ways like failure, but we can go on as individuals and try to fill that void for ourselves. It will look different for all of us.”
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## when we ask ourselves why
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For me, the physical voyage parallels a personal one. Sailing feels like a first step into a search for a way of life more sensitive, a challenge to the doctrines of a culture that makes me feel more lost than landless sea, the blunt antithesis of those things I have been bred to value: comfort, convenience, consumption. *Why* is a word that comes up a lot. I ask myself this question once in a while, flailing and alone in a foreign country, getting sick off the side of a boat full of strangers anchored by an indigenous village in a remote corner of an empty lake in Guatemala or sailing all night through big winds on a boat with three out of four broken winches, the boom tied up to a random cleat at the back, and a stay sail that requires manual furling. Daeli asked me *why* during one of my first evenings on Friend Ship. Friends and family and entitled acquaintances ask the same, with tones ranging from genuine interest to actual offense. I struggle to this day to put forth with feeble words that which is so much more sublime. To your question, I confess that I have no good answer other than the fact that I am young and want to learn about the world before deciding what to do with it.
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That and something about the way grayscale night lingers into the early hours of morning, the range of stars layered millions upon millions going out and out, the way we waited patiently for the colors of day to take their place. It has got something to do with my body, returned to me in uncivilized sea, invulnerable to your scrutiny, unimposed by implication, appreciated for the first time in a long time not as an object of aesthetic servitude but as something deeply personal and wholly mine, the home to all my wonderful senses, the form from which I breath. It is about how I learned to close my eyes and tune in to the direction of the wind, the angle of the boat, the speed with which we move across boundless waters. *Why* relates to all the herons that populated the trees in the canyon that branched out over the blue green river that day we headed for the first time toward sea, the way the birds refrained from flight as we passed by not with disproportionate power nor artificial force but slowly with the flow of the current. It is felt in the fullness of something so taken for granted as still earth after days of drifting in vacant waters, when the sea lets out full, gasping exhales in rhythm as she rushes to kiss the sloping surface of sand soft and light like silk. It showed up the last time we lifted anchor on Utopie, when I reeled in the chain myself, black soot smearing on my legs and smudging under my fingernails, and I realized that I was strong. *Why* finds itself hushed in the suspension of subtle moments, the way once in a while the rising sun and full moon make love in the same sky through which you sail, has to do with how impermanence plays with everything on the horizon until the whole idea of it dissolves into a holy embrace, until these things like now and then and when erupt into irrelevance and for one second or a few, you experience something simpler.
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Riki on the bow of Utopie in Río Dulce
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Some mornings before the sun rose, I imagined it never would. I felt cold at night, sailing in solitude with constellations and watching for dark clouds that foreshadow strong gusts ahead, and I often missed the day. But in the day I sometimes cursed the sun because the heat made me long for night. I learned from the shiver of a moonlit sail, wet from salty waves crashing against the hull and drenching me in the dark, and from the sweat of a scorching one, defenseless to light reflecting off eternal sea, about balance. I learned also, when the sun did rise on those long mornings when I thought it would not and on those uneasy days when the wind stayed stubbornly away, that time fills herself up with all kinds of things, but that all of what is out there has one truth in common, and that is the end.
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*Thanks for reading! This piece was originally published under the title “About a Sea Stray” in* [*Volume II of Duvu Magazine*](https://duvumagazine.company.site/products/Duvu-Magazine-Vol-II-p679000557)*, a women’s arts and culture publication based in Philadelphia, PA. Find them on I*[*nstagram*](https://www.instagram.com/duvumagazine/) *and purchase a copy to see this essay in its physical spread. Below is a sample from the magazine story.*
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