Astonished at Sea

The night sky is truly a wonder to behold

“The night fell lovely in the extreme. After the moon went down, the heaven was a thing to wonder at for stars. And as I lay in the cockpit and looked upon the steersman I was haunted by Emerson’s verses: ‘And the lone seaman all the night sails astonished among stars’.”
Robert Louis Stevenson, from the book ‘In the South Seas’, published in 1896

I had every intention of writing a post today about how we’ve been sailing and tuning our sails on this passage from French Polynesia to Samoa, but I can’t get the vision of last night’s sky out of my head and decided to write this instead.

To all of you who want to read about the sailing stuff, and less of me waxing poetic – bear with me, there’s lots of time for that, as we still have 4 days left on this trip and many thousands of miles to go in the future. Short story for now, we are keeping the sail trim conservative, as it is just the two of us, and this is a big boat. After a few days of fluky conditions, and some motor sailing to make way, we are in a groove and sailing nicely, on the rhumb line for Samoa.

In the evening on SV Duende, after dinner is over and the galley is cleaned up, we start our night watch schedule. We do 3 hours on and 3 hours off, starting at 19:00 hours (7:00 pm). I take the first and third watches, and for the last three days have had the joy of watching the sunset during dinner and then seeing the moonrise on my first watch. The sky brightens on the horizon, the moon comes up, and the stars fade.

Moonrise on the Ocean - photo by LJ

But the waning gibbous moon is rising later each day, and last night the sky was dark right through my 3-hour shift. And as Robert Louis Stevenson so eloquently stated – I was truly astonished. The stars were so bright they hurt my eyes. The Milky Way was a swath of white – like a broad stroke of iridescent paint splashed across the sky from south to north. I lay on the cushions on the bench at the back of the pilothouse and soaked up the view. I saw the brilliant stars and the southern constellations, of which the Southern Cross is most recognizable. And then I started to see the stars between the stars – so many that the entire sky looks like an impressionist painting, done by a master of pointillism. We are too far south for the full benefit of the Perseus Meteor Shower that is peaking this week, but every night I see a couple streak by. Last night one particularly brilliant meteor literally made me gasp and say “oh wow!” – even though there was no one to hear me.

I tried to take some photos, but on a moving boat the continuous shoot night mode just yields the brightest points of light, and a lot of blurry blobs. I’ll have to be satisfied with the image that is burned in my brain from the hours of staring at it in wonder. I wish you could see it too.

I’ll just have to leave you with my description, and another of my watercolors. The night sky last night was nearly as crowded with stars, but there was no island or surf line in view last night. Only ocean, as far as my eyes could see.

Night Sky on a Fantasy Island - original watercolor by LJ

Sail on crew! LJ

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