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Rebecca and I run out to the fo'c'sle to enjoy it. There, we quickly spot our first sign of outside human
life since before the fog descended. It's a fishing boat not far off our bow. A flock of yellow-headed gannets
flies behind it, diving in for scraps.
An hour later, we spot something even better: land ho! To port, we can see the Isles of Scilly—an ar-
chipelago lying just off the south-western tip of England. There's more ship traffic now, and more birds. As
we're about to head aft to the mess room for lunch, Rebecca hears some wet snorting sounds coming from
the water below. She leans over the railing to look down. It's a pod of dolphins, surfing our bow wave.
Fifteen or twenty of them—leaping out of the water, clearing their blowholes, swapping places at the spear
tip of their formation. I basically explode the memory card on my camera trying to capture this.
BY evening, the crew are all standing out on deck with their cell phones. We're close enough to shore to
get a signal now. It's their first chance in a week to make personal calls.
The next morning, on our ninth and final day at sea, we pass through the English Channel. We see the
white cliffs of Dover to port, and Calais to starboard. The radio picks up both French and British pop sta-
tions. The water is thick with sailboats and ships.
In the late afternoon, we enter the Schelde River at its mouth in the North Sea, near the border between
Belgium and the Netherlands. The harbor pilot's small boat comes alongside us, and we drop a rope ladder.
The pilot climbs up on deck and—armed with his extensive local knowledge of tides, currents, and hazard-
ous shoals—directs our freighter safely up the river, toward the port of Antwerp.
Just before sunset, we tie up to our dock in an Antwerp shipping terminal. The cranes immediately roll
into place, ready to unload our containers. I'm ready to be unloaded, too. It's time to pack up our things,
return Witold's DVDs, and say our good-byes to everybody on board.
I think of Christopher Columbus and his crew. They spent five weeks crossing this same ocean, not en-
tirely sure whether anything awaited them on the other side. What relief must have melted over them as
they collapsed to their knees on that Bahamian beach. I think I might be feeling a tiny morsel of that same
resolution.
As we pull on our backpacks and get ready to disembark, an unfamiliar odor enters my nostrils. It's in-
toxicating. I can't quite place it. And then I realize: It's the freshly mown grass of a lawn on the opposite
bank of the river. It's the smell of land.
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