Scraping light winds with a Spinnaker

Gulf of Mexico. We've been at sea for three nights and have covered less than two hundred miles. The weather, while admittedly benign compared to our previous run from Key West to Tarpon Springs, has been unfavorable to say the least. After being towed into open water by Sonador and taking to the wind in a full six knots of glory, Arianna charged thirty miles into the Gulf before coming to an abrupt and alarming stop. We've been doing all we can just to keep her nose pointed towards Mobile, but are more or less entrapped by a beautifully calm sea: dead winds, light winds, and more dead winds.

The ultimate doom of the autopilot lends to our plight. We're now on watch twenty-four hours a day compared to the twelve we were able to get by on when the autopilot was functioning. Mark, Anna and I are splitting up the time as equally as possible, which makes for a pretty full day's work for each of us.

The water is gorgeous. Only some four vessels total have come within visual range since we left Tarpon Springs on Wednesday morning. With one exception, all had chosen to make headway via motor owing to the placid, lake like conditions. We've been joined enthusiastically by a few pods of dolphins, and have taken on the dejected company of some incredibly tired swallow-like birds.

Being joined by dolphins during a night-watch is a strange business. Their surprisingly long, cadaver-white bodies glimmer swiftly and silently beneath the water even on a black, moonless night. Like glowing shadows, their soft white shapes repeatedly congregate into one huge, writhing undersea mass and then explode again into racing individuals.

Three little birds

I was able to replenish my reading supply at Back in the Day Books, a pleasant little bookstore in Tarpon Springs, before setting off on the second half of our passage. So far I've gone through Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls and Philip K. Dick's Valis, both of which I really enjoyed. Valis is reminiscent of Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions. Both Breakfast of Champions and Valis ring with highly personal tones, and both books feature their authors as central characters. Dead Souls reads a lot like Dickens. While some of that could certainly be due to its translator, Gogol's generously wordy, ironic flourish is apparent in the content, not just the vocabulary, of his writing. Take, for example:

Now I wonder what to call the two ladies without arousing anger, as has happened to me before. It is dangerous to invent some name for them. Whatever name I might pick, there's sure to be someone in some corner of our vast land who bears that name, and he'll become furious and declare that I've been snooping around, spying on everyone, and have discovered who he is, what sort of coat he wears, which lady he sees, and what's his favorite dish. And it is much more dangerous to mention his position and rank. Nowadays, persons in all high positions are terribly touchy and are convinced that every fictional character is a living person. Such seems to be the general state of mind. It's enough to say there's a stupid person in such-and-such a town, and you've already stepped on someone's dignity: a respectable looking gentleman will jump up shouting something about his being a person, too, and since he lives in that particular town, is he, by any chance, being called stupid, too? In short, he'll have immediately divined the author's intentions.

Dolphins are difficult to photograph

Dead Souls, by the way, leaves the reader hanging while ardently promising a conclusion in the near future. Nikolai, true to his word, spent ten years working and re-working the story's second half. He then burned the manuscript shortly before his death in 1852. Bummer.

Even at an average rate of just three knots, we should make it into Mobile Bay in the next three days. If, with any luck, some real wind decides to grace our journey, we'll be there in a little more than twenty-four hours.