Highlights from The Long Way by Bernard Moitessier
Highlights from this book
-
Before I left, I could not see the point of continually towing a log
-
also pulled out the large scale charts. Wisdom, real wisdom, would be to throw them all overboard, to avoid the temptation of closing with the coast to give word via a ship or a fisherman in the dangerous Bass Strait between Australia and Tasmania.
-
There were no compasses on the Gulf of Siam junks, and I did not want it used during my sailing school cruises in the Mediterranean. Instead of bearing 110° from France to Corsica my crew had to steer with the mistral swell very slightly off the port quarter. At night, it was the Pole Star one small hand abaft the port beam. And if there was neither distinct swell nor star, we made do with whatever we had. I wanted it that way, because concentrating on a magnetized needle prevents one from participating in the real universe, seen and unseen, where a sailboat moves.
-
land is so far away compared to the questions the stars are asking me. I can only give them my first log, with birds, sea, daily sights and little everyday problems. My real log is written in the sea and sky; it can’t be photographed and given to others. It has gradually come to life out of all that has surrounded us for months: the sounds of water on the hull, the sounds of wind gliding on the sails, the silences full of secret things between my boat and me, like the times I spent as a child listening to the forest talk.
-
When I step into the cockpit to fill my lungs and talk with the sea, I leave the harness in the pocket, because I keep hold of the cabin hatch cover then, eyes and ears everywhere at once for erratic breaking seas, ready to open the hatch and jump inside to safety. A second and a half is all I need to open the cover, step through the hatch, quickly flop down on the inside steering seat and slam the hatch over my head, pulling down hard so that the neoprene seal fits tight all around. With the harness I would feel less mobile. And there is something else . . . the intimate participation with things around me. The harness would only link me to some steel cleat, not to the rest.
-
A bad blow, if the camera had let me down. It has become a real friend. I believe it helped me to see things that I may not have seen as clearly on my own, during the voyage.
-
I feel a dangerous urge to go out on the bowsprit pulpit . . . I don’t dare go beyond the staysail: it marks the farthest limit of good sense. In surfing, water is no longer water, but rock.
-
I ate nothing this morning, nothing at noon. Not from laziness or nerves; I just didn’t feel like it. Penguins and seals go for long periods without food in the mating season, other animals do the same in the great migrations. And deep within himself man may carry the same instinct to leave food aside, as animals do in the solemn moments of their lives.