Today is probably the sixth day at sea. Probably? Who could say, exactly. The succession of days and nights pass like the wave tops and troughs under our boat. Time ceased to be of importance, distances lost their meaning, only direction counts, and keeping the boat sailing, ever in motion, ever towards the destination beyond the horizon. We are in flow. The rhythm of the passage has embraced us.
The engine is humming today. With its 6 cylinders, a reassuring constant murmuring has been with us for the past night and this morning. The wind has ceased yesterday evening, with the low south to us, which had powered the airflow, slowly filling and diminishing. It left us with a reminder of damp air thick as yoghurt.
We are enveloped in fog, so dense you can touch it. Materialising in the finest of droplets settling on the skin as one steps outside from the near tropical warmth of the cabin. The heating coupled to the engine coolant circuit brought the inside temperature up over night and the moisture down while outside a thick blanket of vapour surrounds us. We move our own disk of visibility, which is ever so slowly increasing since last night, when we could barely see much farther than our bow and a few meters past our stern. Truly in our own little world. A bit like the white ‘room’ in the film The Matrix, only not quite so bright.
Near the boat, the water has a dark-greenish tinge, petrol called at times. A blue-green not saturated as it were if the sun would penetrate, but carrying rather a hint of colour. As we look towards the edges of our horizon, we see the long swell slowly peeling away from the mist. The wave tops at times disappearing once more in the fog, returning into the white for a brief moment before peeling for real and rolling ahead.
Between the boundary of our vision and the boat, the undulating hills of water seem to become ever more transparent the farther they are from the boat, a gradient of white overlaying the scene and fading it out around the edges. The water mirrors the white dome above and around us, but it is not devoid of colour. If we look closely, we see the hints of blueish-green in each of the wavelets’ faces. A landscape far from monotone if repetitive in its varying patterns.
The slowly rolling long hills of water put me in mind of the Champagne, which we drove through on our road trip to the boat in St Malo from Switzerland. On the way, we stopped in the medieval town of Troyes to meet our lovely friends Jean-Luc and Marie for a short and sweet reunion and being treated to their incredible hospitality and culinary delights. They bought an old stone house full of character that they have been rebuilding for over a year. We had seen the house at Easter last year, helping with carrying out 200kg heaters, as we were there in an opportune moment, and feasting on the most buttery croissants and cheese. The transformation the house has gone through since is remarkable, a true gem they turned it into, their attention to detail and care showing in each corner.
Today is Saturday, 10th June, 10:15UTC, the tablet says. We are all up now, some having had breakfast earlier, some now. A by now customary bowl of boat-made yoghurt with oats, apples, toasted nuts and seeds, dried fruit and granola makes the lion share of our brekkies. Alex and I have been making our yoghurt for years, since we first were given a culture by sailing friends in Portugal in October 2019. This culture we lost just as we arrived in Tobago end of February 2020.
As luck wanted it, we met a friendly boat that gifted us another culture within a few days which has been with us ever since. A Turkish strand that Tali and Werner of SY Umadum picked up on their journey in South Africa, and took across the southern Atlantic to Brazil and all the way up to to Tobago, where we met. Since, the yoghurt has become our pet of kinds, and we have taken it everywhere we went ever since. Weather on passage, in high waves, in the tropics, in the Swiss mountains, on holiday in the Canaries, it always works!
When we had left for France, we forgot our yoghurt prepared and ready to take. On our stop-over in Bern with Linda and Thom, they helped mitigate the shock and find a wonderful solution. As it happens, Thom did his PhD on gene-sequencing of yoghurt cultures. Is not world a funny place, full of interesting coincidences? Thom suggested sending a letter with dried and wet yoghurt samples to France per express post. And that’s just what we did.
Rafael, our new friend who is looking after our flat while we are away, carefully dried two samples of our yoghurt, and send off a package. We eagerly awaited it, expecting to have it in our hands any day. We waited and waited, and it didn’t arrive. Cryptic updates in the tracking service didn’t reveal its destiny. But arrive it did, eventually. The day before sailing day!
Meanwhile, being without yoghurt, we had found a tasty one at the goat farm neighbouring the boat yard where we worked long hours to get Atlas ready for the sea. This farm yoghurt turned out successful too, so now we are blessed with two yoghurt cultures, and having grown attached to both, we keep both of them going. And not a bad thing, given the rate at which we are eating it!
Arnaud, our captain, always wonderfully gracious with praise, says that being able to make our own fresh yoghurt as we go along is one of the major upgrades of the season. 😉