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There are also tougher rules and stricter enforcement with regard to drugs and alcohol. Today's sailors tend
to be a staid, workmanlike bunch, less enthralled by the romance of the high seas than by the allure of a
steady paycheck.
THE middle days of an ocean passage begin to blur together. There are no landmarks to break up the voy-
age and let you take stock of your progress. Hour after hour, day and night, the freighter chugs through the
waves of an empty sea.
In open water, the ship maintains a constant speed of 17.5 knots—or roughly twenty miles per hour.
Today's freighters are generally not expected to run at top speeds, as that would eat up expensive fuel. If a
company needs cargo delivered very quickly instead of very cheaply, they'll use air freight.
Twenty miles per hour feels painfully slow, even by the standards of a surface traveler. For instance, pic-
ture yourself riding by bus from Seattle to Miami, without ever stopping for gas or food or lodging, keeping
the speedometer locked in at 20 mph. That's essentially what we're doing as we cross the Atlantic—except
that we're covering an additional thousand miles.
After twenty-four hours at sea, we were due south of Nova Scotia. After forty-eight hours, we were south
of the island of Newfoundland. There's a small magnetic model of the ship stuck on a map that's attached
to the metal wall of the mess room. At each meal-time, after politely greeting Daphne and Frank, Rebecca
consults her GPS and moves the ship an eighth-inch hop—about 10 degrees of longitude. Our progress
from meal to meal seems infinitesimal.
When it's as clear as the days have been so far, our visibility looking out from a railing is about twenty
miles. So, at our 20 mph pace, we can look at the horizon's edge and know that's where we'll be precisely
one hour from now. Of course, we know that when we get there it will look dismayingly similar to the place
we'd been one hour before.
By my calculation, we can survey 1,250 square miles of ocean at any given time. And all of it is barren.
We never see other ships out here. (When I ask Rikus why we're not seeing other freighters, his answer
boils down to: It's a really big ocean.) There are no planes or contrails above, as we're not beneath any
flight paths. Our view is of endless water and sky, punctuated by whitecaps and wispy clouds.
Until the fog rolls in.
A little more than halfway to Europe, almost dead center in the middle of the Atlantic, we wake up one
morning to find the ship entirely shrouded. We can't see more than thirty feet beyond the railings. We can't
make out the bow from the stern. It used to be our front yard was an infinite expanse of sea. Now it's an
encroaching wall of mist.
The fog stays with us all day and night, and into the next day and night. It heightens the
sense—absolutely true, as it happens—that the ship is an enclosed, self-sustaining world. The twenty-seven
of us on board are the population of this lonely universe. And suddenly our little freighter is feeling very
claustrophobic.
Rebecca's brain moves about forty-seven times faster than the brain of an average human. This is a great
boon to her as a lawyer. But out here, with nothing to do, and naught to look at but an opaque curtain of
gray, it's distinctly less advantageous. “I've been fantasizing about sneaking onto the bridge and slamming
the throttle forward,” she says. “If only I could somehow hydroplane the freighter at 200 mph all the way
to Europe.”
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