There is something about sailing that makes it get into your blood. For centuries sailing and the sea have been romanticized and made to look like the most unforgiving environment known, all in the same story. I think both are true and then some. Well, first off let me tell you what got me thinking of this. Earlier I went up to the cockpit to start my watch at 2000h. It is barely after sunset here and so I enjoyed the full evening twilight between the setting sun and dark. There was, across most of the horizon a bank of clouds which seemed to lift off the horizon and show a bright orange sunset color beneath that portion of the clouds. Except there were smaller clouds under the big bank of clouds and with the orange glow behind them these clouds took on the appearance of some different objects; a camel, an elephant a big square block, an apostrophe and a few things I could not imagine were anything but clouds. My first thought was that sight would never be seen on land, only at sea with an unobstructed view of the horizon. Clouds can only hold my interest for so long, mostly because they change or the sun continues to sink and you can�'t really see them. Being a keen observer of my surroundings I started to notice some other things. Let me step back first and describe those surroundings. When on watch, particularly at night I sit in the very back of the cockpit on the leeward side of the boat. That means the wind is blowing from the opposite side from where I am and when the boat is heeled over a bit I am but three feet or so from the water, I can see all the sails and touch the ocean at the same time. I can also see the instruments, chart plotter and radar screen, so I can see what the boat is doing with a glance upward. The sounds I hear are pretty basic sea sounds; the loudest is the water rushing by the hull just feet from my ears. It changes both in tone and volume as the boat speeds up or slows down or a wave passes underneath. The other sounds are more background noise, the wind in the rigging, the creaking of lines moving a bit as they are strained or slacked by the wind, the occasional whir of the autopilot. The one jarring possibility is when a wave bangs into the boat, making a loud crashing sound and everything shudders a bit. That only happens every once in a while, and is most likely a reminder that I am not master of the universe. There is no other noise. No voices from people or machines, no machines, nothing but the sea and the boat. Lest I forget, every half hour the ships clock strikes a number of bells depending on the time. Eight Bells, my watch starts, (and the clock starts over with one bell at half past the hour) Four hours later Eight Bells and my watch is done. So, when the wind picks up a little I see the sails stretch a bit before the boat accelerates and leans into it more. At the same time the sound of the waves from the wake of the boat get louder and the tone changes as they move faster. As the boat heels a bit I am closer to the ocean. It becomes easy to know what the boat is doing without looking at the electronics, simply by listening and feeling the motion. As you can imagine this feeling of the movement and momentum does not happen the first time you set foot aboard a sailboat. But it may happen the first time you sit alone in the dark close to the water thinking about sailing and what it means. One of the things that is awe inspiring is the ability of a small amount of wind to be harnessed to a few square feet of canvas and make a twenty-ton boat feel like it is moving as fast as a freight train. Fast is clearly a relative term; jet planes are really fast and really big and they have thousands of horsepower to push them or they fall down. This boat displaces twenty tons of water, which an engineer could probably describe better than I but basically it means it pushes twenty tons of water out of the way when it moves. Plus, it has to overcome inertia and move its own weight which is not insignificant. We have about 1500 square feet of sail area in three sails. Now consider this. If you were standing on the beach in a 15 kt breeze you would feel it but it won�'t trouble you at all, however it will move this big heavy boat really fast, relatively speaking. The thing about sailing is it is different from any other activity I know. You use all your senses, you must be in tune with the wind and water and it is peaceful. It restores. More later�.... PS: We are 133 NM from New Zealand