For those of you who were not aware, we sailed a lot in the past few years. And much of this was offshore.
Now well over 10,000 miles since Ipswich, we have seen some crazy stuff: weather, places, people, etc. But something has surprised me… I did not take THAT many photos.
Don’t get me wrong, I carry a camera of some sort everywhere and I’m taking a lot of photos – even if it is just for a tweet or Instagram. But hours and hours and hours at sea… is there really nothing to photograph out there?
Before our first “out of sight of land” experience crossing the Thames from the River Orwell to Ramsgate back in December, I had been offshore plenty of times. Most people who travel have, for that matter. Ferries – like the ones I’ve taken from Patmos, Greece, to Bari, Italy; or the one from Hollyhead over to Dublin – certainly go “offshore” and they are far out of the sight of land. And most cruise ships (of which I have done one) hug the coast, but there are times that they pass outside of sight of land.
But these big-boat offshore experiences did not prepare me. It did not prepare me for little ol’ PROTEUS and the big big sea.
What is out there? A whole lot of nothing. In every direction. And, quite often, it isn’t long that you’re out of sight of land that you’re also out of VHF range, too. Only the scratchy high-power bursts from the area coast guard can be heard. Then, after a little while longer, the only thing you’re able to hear is the occasional chatter from fishing boats that might be just at the horizon. And by “occasional chatter” I mean little transmissions of what sounds like gruff mumbling occasionally laced with punctuations of profanity, often the only words that are actually comprehensible… especially off foreign shores.
But, basically, it is incredible how much nothing there is out there.
Perhaps an example might be in order?
On any given hour underway offshore, I could sit on the side of the cockpit.
The water directly beside the boat is approximately a four foot drop, but beneath that is anywhere from a few dozen to a few thousand meters of water.
To my right…
…and to my left…
…the boat is its own little kingdom. This is all there is. And, if you look really close at the photo of the “to my right” photo above, you’ll actually see the faint darkness in the haze of Cabo Finisterre, the northwest tip of Spain.
But even at a dozen miles offshore, everything is extremely far away. And a “close pass” could be by a mile or more. When crossing the Atlantic, we considered a “close pass” something that sets off the AIS (automatic identification system): targets closer than two miles away. Set for coastal passages, though, the AIS is set to warn us of targets within a half-mile radius. But more on that in a moment…
Most of the time, this is what it looks like:
A wide angle (16mm) shot straight out. Vast openness of sky and sea, water in every direction. The next thing in that direction is the North American continent.
Believe it or not, though, there are actually FIVE fishing vessels “close” in the above photo. Here are three:
Compare the two? See them!? Yeah… it takes a lot of effort out there, too. And, to help you a bit, here is the zoomed in version, overlayed with the wide angle version:
On the map, these boats are within a few miles: I don’t remember exactly, but I’d guess within two or three miles. And these aren’t small boats. They’re, on average, about twice the length of PROTEUS. The big commercial fishing boats like these weigh in around 80 feet.
Now… just for kicks and giggles, what does a REALLY close pass look like. I’m talking about a super-close, sphincter-puckering pass…?
This is at about a quarter mile… (And he’s in the 600 foot long range.)
Still not that close, right? Well… you only think “a quarter mile isn’t that close” until it happens in the middle of the night. If this happened in the middle of the night, heart rates on both vessels would be off the charts.
But most of the time, it looks like this…
…and seeing something as innocuous as foam on the water dozens or hundreds of miles out at sea with absolutely nothing around makes the mind wander: “Maybe there’s a submarine under us!?” “Maybe the Cracken is coming!?” “Maybe there’s a whale!?”
It is probably just the foam from a boat that passed hours ago.
As the quote says, the sea is an amazing liberation from human scale. Compared to the sea, we are always children standing on the beach thinking we can see miles and miles and miles and maybe if you squint a little I bet you could just make out the other side… but, in reality, you’re not even able to get to double digit miles.
Can you understand my difficulty in making photographs on passage? There’s so much out there, how can I even make a photo of it: the vast emptiness that covers most of the world is not able to be captured in an image. It is a thing to experience, not to just see, and perhaps the handicap is made worse because we make cameras to take photos at the perspective of humans. (That’s why people naturally think wide angle photos are naturally “more interesting”: we normally don’t see that way.) So, to capture anything on the ocean is naturally limited to our inability to wrap our minds around incredible immensitudes.
To comprehend the sea, then, I suppose we have to get outside ourselves, outside the limits of human scale, and look at “close” on the scale of “multiple miles.” Then, almost everything visible is close. If you live in a big neighborhood, you might live “close” to ten thousand people! Perhaps things just beyond the horizon is still pretty close! After all, it is just a short drive, right? And, at that scale, when does “far” begin?
I wonder if this is the secret that needs to be unlocked in order to finally get some peace in this world. When everything is close and nothing is really that far, “us” and “them” starts to get really silly, really small-minded. I see the faint pinpoints of sailors on a ship passing a half-mile away and am seeing all those experiences, all that time and effort at living… and how small I must be as they pass me so far away: “Haha! Look at that tiny boat out there so far from shore!”
And then we pass by a promontory and see the little houses full of people. Maybe they’re asleep or cooking dinner or loving each other or hating their neighbor? What then could I photograph out here at sea that would be any more honest that pointing my camera the other way, out into the blue vastness of space, and saying: “Ah, here is what is out here.”
Stay tuned,
-Noah D.
