One Less Plane

During the many hours of staring out to sea, my thoughts often drifted to others who i knew would also be floating out at sea, somewhere in the world. Here are three of them, on much more heroic, risky and altruistic missions than me!:

OJ in Palestine. OJ is one of the people who inspired me to sail, she is amazing, and last year travelled over land and sea to Cyprus from where she then sailed through Israeli military blockades to Palestine, and has since been going out to sea with Palestinian fishermen, acting as a human shield to try to stop the military shooting at them, as they fished for their daily food. Unbelievably and humblingly, OJ took the time to email me 2 weeks ago, from the warzone, to congratulate me on my Atlantic crossing. From panicking for her when i first heard the news once we had landed, i was so relieved to hear she was ok, but she also told me she, along with the Palestinians, was in a ‘living hell’. Even if the main bombings have stopped (so i hear), i know that the aftermath will be as hellish, and the suffering continues. So i don’t know what to do but we can read about it, and do something, at the very least, about it here:  www.freegaza.org

Then i thought about Vitze (i actually have no idea how to spell his name!), from Nottingham, who i met just before we both set sail for different oceans. He is on the Sea Shepard, and looks from their blog, like they are currently in Japanese waters trying to save the Minke and Fin whales from being hunted. (You can read about that here: www.seashepherd.org)

And i thought about Lista Light – a beautiful beautiful old wooden boat, with proper rigging you have to haul (no winches), and a crew of ecologists ( and a  fiddle player, shanty singer, and tandem riders), who were setting off for the Atlantic crossing Las Palmas – Antigua, at the same time as i did.  They planned to do the whole crossing without engine power for propulsion, and were even attempting to navigate old style – with a sextant. So i had wondered how long they would have been bobbing around for in the no wind patch that we had hit (which we used our engine to escape from!) and I had started to worry about them when two weeks after we arrived i had not yet sighted them. However, i have since heard from them, to my relief, that they ended up in St Martin instead (deliberately), but had indeed been becalmed for a week, plus had a disastrous snapping of the mast or boom or something, and almost abandoned ship, but even with this managed to cross in only about 6 days more than we did. Wuhoo for wind power!! You can read about them here: www.listalight.co.uk   and for an gripping account (better than mine) of their atlantic crossing, you can read some of the crew’s account here (everyone has blog these days!): www.3mproundtheworld.com