on the surreal sea

As we sail from the continent out into the vastness of ocean and we move to the second week our little cocoon shrinks around us. Be careful of the mind, they say, in such open-skied confinement. We jump overboard. There is something surreal about swimming two hundred kilometres from land and five kilometres above the sea bed, being towed by a rope behind a yacht that is the only boat in the entire world. We have not seen anyone since leaving Northwest Cape. We are doing this to gain rally points, we stop the boat to swim, to take underwater photographs.

But even more surreal is later on a moonless dark night with the phosphorescent stars above and below and the boat is not a boat but a spaceship flying far from home. A hundred dolphins herd flying fish against the hull and pick them off in a frenzy, fish and dolphins weaving and leaping in the light breeze, as we sail at timeless speed towards a distant galaxy. The fish are so panicked that they leap in desperation into the cockpit, hit the dreaming helmsman in the face, or through the open galley porthole to land dangerously close to the frypan.

And then we are running time-on-distance to some imaginary line, 10degrees south, bear away, come up, slow the boat, counting down, five, four, three, two, one, crossing now, exactly eleven am on the fourth, a line on the ocean fed to us and race control by a little yellow electronic brick and a few satellites. Are we sane?