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