Status Updates From Sea Change: Alone Across th...

That after disgracing myself years ago in a Bristol Channels gale, I could go back to sea alone and acquit myself well...Through my shame and grief I find I'm proud of our fine voyage. The ending was simply how it finished, not the voyage itself.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;

Years before, he had hit a reefer in the South Pacific that holed his wooden boat...While building it, Bardiaux had filled every spare cubic spot inside his boat with sealed empty cans of air, enough to provide the boat with flotation. He sailed it, virtually sunk, with only the rig and sails sticking up out of the water, for four days until he reached a port, where he hauled out and repaired the hole.

The ability to navigate by sextant and one's instincts, and to manage the boat according to the dicatates of the sea and sky, he feels, is passing, and I agree with him.

I take the Hiscocks, all nine of them; Eric's complete oeuvre,
hardbacked, blue cloth, Oxford University Press. They are saltstained, half-ruined, broken-spined, dust jackets long disintegrated,
the foundation of my library and of who I am, for they describe
all I want to do and the world in which I want to do it and upon
them I will build once more from scratch. The rest I hope I can find
again.

Now I know that the leak will not get better but worse, that I can't keep ahead of it, that I must get off, save my life, and let Toad sink.

Trim my mustache to an RAF shape and marry the daughter of a missionary, Celia, with whom I would have brittle fights on the veranda after dinner. Go quietly mad.

Or perhaps go native "poor chap, bad
business" and meet a Burmese woman and raise a bunch of beautiful Eurasian children.

"Where are you going?" I ask.
"We are going to Burma!"
"Burma?"
"Yes, Burma! You know, next door to India!"
What a thought! What might be waiting for me in Burma?
Perhaps I could turn into a Somerset Maugham character, become
an old Burma "hand." Manage a rubber plantation, wear baggy
shorts and a pith helmet, and start drinking a lot of gin.

Or if we had stayed together and rebuilt
our relationship as we had rebuilt Toad, cutting out the rot back to
what was clean and sound, and building on the good stuff. But I
didn't see how we could do that any more than meet each other
again for the first time.
I started running.... It seemed the only thing in the world I could do that did
something in return for me. The longer I ran, the better I felt.

I have thought, since leaving her, that we might have been perfect together if we could have met for the first time as the people
we were when we split up or perhaps quite a bit later. People
who had acquired some knowledge of marital relations and could
use it to make one work.

Our final break came not with a bang but a series of whimpers.
We left Toad in Ibiza, one island short of our destination of Mallorca
because we could bear to sail no farther together. I left almost
immediately for London. J. followed two months later, after she had
found a home for the cats with someone in Germany because there
was no bringing them to England with a six-month-long quarantine.

I must try to get Toad safely to land. I must be a man about it. I don't have to commit suicide and go down with the ship if it really sinks; I can try to save myself if the struggle ahead fails despite my best efforts.
But I must struggle well. That, finally, is what I'm here to do.

But I am here at last. Not just sailing across the ocean to get to the other side, to Maine to sell the boat, as I originally set out to do; nor alone for lack of crew. I am sailing to meet my true self, and hoping to find an improved version. I don't want to see myself curling up again. I may have more than I bargained for, with the condition of my boat, but all I could hope for as a test.

We felt worthless because we were doing nothing and going nowhere. It is the common trap of the indolent tropics.

We sat there rubbing our model ship hulls across our faces.
What class was this? Because this wasn’t a one-time thing. This was what I did at Bayham Road School. Any other area of the curriculum I have forgotten.
... It never turned into a hobby at home. Where are those models now? I took them home, but I must have thrown them out to make room for comic books, bowie knives and Beatles albums.

When the sea-hog jumps,
Look out for your pumps.

I close the diary which is red, its pages rippled and fattened with
mildew, and this thing like a sneeze rises up and comes out of me
and I find I am crying.
I go up into the cockpit and take a look around. No ships,
empty ocean. Not much wind, but short lumpy seas from the
northwest which slow Toad down.
I start pumping the bilge again.

While Toad is afloat, I always thought we might get back together.
This thought always brings up the questions I continue to askmyself about what went wrong with us. And these questions pull me irresistibly back to her diaries--now that I've opened the bag adn found them--to pore through them in a queasy reverie of nostalgia and pain.

I must now, however, be seriously prepared to abandon Toad—
As I write this the pen stops moving. I get up and make another
cup of coffee and what I've just written reverberates around my
mind like a sound in a canyon: loud then faint then loud again.
Coffee ready, I take my mug back to the saloon table and start
writing in the log again.
I won't, unless it actually sinks.

The Germans walk out of the water shivering and laughing, and
thanking me for such a great adventure. Their suspicions of the perilous nature of small-boat sailing' are confirmed. There are some
jokes about how I've made it this far from England. They decide to
go back to their hotel and change. We say good night.
I think it's time to head for Maine.

"I think I can, in retrospect, diagnose my trouble as a combination of chronic indigestion and acute imagination, and it shows the danger of giving a layman a medical book!"

There was no point in telling Susan about my symptoms, but after a day or two I could no longer keep the horrid secret to myself.
"I've got a pain in my tummy," I said eventually, "and I think it may be appendicitis."

Halfway to Corsica, Derek turned to me and said, ‘Peter, I’m going to vomit in a minute. Which side of the boat would be best?’

Reliance on safety harnesses--a modern device--has meant a widespread atrophy of that best of all devices to keep you aboard: a fully developed horror of falling overboard.