Jean, who of the four French-Melanesian fellows we met last night smoking weed at the nakamal was the quietest and most stonery, nods skittishly when I ask if the guys across the way have 'cannabis'.

Jean wears a real-deal beard, the kind achieved through weeks or months of unkempt growth, and a reflective-chartreuse traffic vest, though it's not clear if he works as a road worker during the day (he might just be into the look?), and he certainly doesn't work as a policeman.

We're not quite sure the story on Jean -- though members of our crew have sighted him twice this day around town and wondered if he's not pseudo-homeless each time. What's clear is that this might be the dodgiest moment of my life. His frantic nodding seems a parody of skittishness -- and a parody way, way over the top, at that -- but it's not.

I am made so uncomfortable by his nodding that I almost forget the task at hand -- almost. Get cannabis. Find it somehow, preferably not getting arrested or too severely ridiculed in the process. More immediately, figure out a less narky, more discrete word for the substance in question. Speaking French would be a start.

Labels: hapless fisherman

On passage at night, startled jellyfish blink and phosphoresce in our bow wave.

The experience of taking watch -- which is to say, the experience of getting woken up in the middle of the night and then going up on deck to be relatively inactive and totally alone but still have to stay awake and be alert -- is made more exciting when one is following a malarone-based malaria profylaxis regimen that makes dreams weird and inexplicably vivid. One night, after stumbling up and into the cockpit still half asleep, I switch on the autopilot and sketch the outline of a dream in which our expedition team attends a children's television show shoot (replete with dinosaur-like host-in-stuffed-animal-suit). The encounter culminates in my over-running the set in a way that to me seems hilarious and exuberant and iconoclastic but which might simply be juvenile and disrespectful. Who can say? Who can know the contents of other dream-characters' feelings and perceptions? What's up with wondering about this, anyway?

On balance, I'm not really into this blog post.

More to come, hopefully of a slightly different variety.

Labels: bluewater sailing

Poems about unsuccessful fly fishing to be read whilst bearing in mind the distinctive narrative intonation of Christopher Walken, Pt.1:

Words for types of weather phenomena
Are the most numerous things at sea,
turns out.
That's right --
More numerous than fish,
even.
Way more numerous, in fact.

Labels: fishlessness, hapless fisherman, pseudoadventure