Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
This was all neatly analogous to my broader situation: instead of a nice, short jaunt on
a press boat or a proper research vessel, I was going to sea for three weeks or more. A
thousand miles from land when I wanted to be at home in New York, when I
should
have
been at home, squaring away wedding plans, preparing for the moment of my good fortune,
only two months away, when the Doctor and I would get hitched. And the
Kaisei
would be
sailing in total seaborne isolation. There would be no satellite phone for the crew, no data
connection, no way to communicate with my family or with the Doctor. No way even to
apologize, once I went, for being gone.
The ship itself was charming, if a bit scruffy, with cabins that were cozy but not claus-
trophobic, and a pair of lounges ample for a small crew, and decks of faded wood. In front
of the wheelhouse, with its radio and its radar display, was an outdoor bridge, where the
deck rose into a platform facing a large, spoked wheel. It was the kind of wheel I would
have expected to see on the wall of a nautical-themed restaurant.
The problem was not the
Kaisei.
The problem was us. As the days went by, spent
in sanding and painting and offloading unneeded scientific equipment from the previous
year's voyage, I met the volunteers who would be the crew. How many people did it take to
sail a 150-foot brigantine? I wasn't sure we yet had ten. And as we got to know one anoth-
er, it emerged that very few of us knew anything that would be useful in the safe operation
of said brigantine.
There was Kaniela, for instance, an affable young surfer from Hawaii and one of the
hardest workers on the boat. He asked me if I knew much about sailing.
I didn't, I said. Not a thing. You?
Nah, man. I'm hoping to learn.
Then there were Gabe and Henry, two recently graduated Oberlin hipsters. The morning
we met, they were standing on deck huddled against the early chill, hands stuffed in their
pockets, wearing their sunglasses. A surly pair, I thought, but they turned out just to be
badly hung over, and had brightened up by mid-afternoon. They told me they both had de-
grees, more or less, in environmental studies, or something. Upon moving back to Marin
County from Oberlin, they had gotten internships at the Ocean Voyages Institute, the um-
brella organization for Project Kaisei. But three weeks at sea seemed a little extreme for an
internship. I asked them why they were coming.
With a straight face, Gabe told me that he was here for the adventure. He wanted to be
an adventurer. A
rakish rogue,
he specified. And this was the first step toward his goal.
The ravings of a contaminated mind. I turned to Henry. I asked him if either of them
knew how to sail.
