500 hours of blue across the Atlantic
Leadership lessons from my sailing journey across the Atlantic, following Columbus route.
Sailing journal: February 3rd 2017, somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean.
The air smells different today, it smells some kind of familiar. We have been sailing for 20 days through 3,800 nautical miles of blue, without seeing land nor other human being besides the eight of us. Only 500 hours of disconnection, yet I wonder if we are still the same humans we were before leaving land.
Suddenly someone screams “Land!!” like in the best stories of pirates and explorers.
We all get outside with an instinctive fury to see land. Only now, I understand why the air smells so different: it smells of land. That land, where we learnt to walk and stand on our feet.
At this point everybody gets so excited, we are arriving! we are getting there to whatever kind of land awaits us! What is making us so excited? Is that land?
Each of us is now in his own thoughts: who is looking forward to read the inbox, who is wondering if war has eventually started in his own country, who is getting hyper-excited and restless to be on a boat, who is licking his lips craving for an ice-cream (that is me 🍦).
I have a mix of feelings, somehow something has changed inside myself, my dreams have stopped screaming.
My original dream of being a solo sailor around the world
Since I was a 10 years old kid, I spent days and nights reading about explorers, sailors, pirates, who sailed around the world all their life, some alone, some with a crew, some for competing, some for surviving, some for fun. But they all had something in common, that goes beyond the life at sea and beyond the reason why they sailed. All these people are inspiring for the way they think and reason, for the way they see the world, the reality. My favorite has been by far Bernard Moitessier, who kept sailing alone around the world all his life. He wrote books and even shot a movie, sharing his life with the sea but also with the people on land, through his written words.
My dream was clear: make some money, then buy a boat and set sail to the ultimate adventure: sailing around the world, alone.
Following Colombus route, I eventually sailed From the “Old World” to the “New World”, with some stops in between, not alone though:
- Malaga — Canary Islands
- Canary Islands — Cape Verde
- Cape Verde — Trinidad and Tobago.
An exciting start from Spain 🌊
After quitting my job, at the age of 31, I decided it was time to fulfill my dream. Being wiser than a 10 years old dreamer, I eventually decided to experience an Atlantic crossing as a member of a crew first, to gain experience for my solo adventure. So I found a sailing boat leaving from Malaga in November 2016, and joined the crew.
We sailed from Malaga to Canaries, in one week, facing probably the worst weather I ever experienced while sailing. Huge waves up to eight meters high, strong wind and night lightnings made our life on board very difficult for three long days 💨 Great start of my adventure!
I find it fascinating how the perception of dimension of the space we live in can vary, based on the circumstances. A sailing boat can look relatively big when docked, but it looses all its greatness once in the allow of a wave. Yet, it can feel unsafe before setting sail, but it gains enormous respect after some days without seeing land: it becomes your home ⛵, your safest place you can be at.
Arrived to Canaries, I felt the need to leave the boat and get some days on the island on my own, in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria.
Las Palmas: Looking for new opportunities
In Las Palmas, I started thinking about my next move: buying a sailing boat and continue my journey? Or maybe looking for a spot in a crew? This dilemma reminded me of another one: looking for a job or staring my own business? I decided to explore both possibilities before deciding. I went to look for a few boats for sale around the island and found one that could be a good deal! At the same time I also started looking for a crew to join. Got some opportunities, but similarly to looking for a job, you soon realize that it takes effort to find one (job or crew) that fits you well.. And it will never fit you perfectly.
How to look for the right boat (and crew) to join
Can you trust the Captain? Will you get along with the crew? Is the boat safe?
These are the most typical questions you will need to answer when looking for a long journey. Remember you are going to spend a month on that boat! One month in a restricted space, with the same people, in the middle of nowhere. If something happens, physically or mentally, you will be alone, there will be no helicopter that can reach you in the middle of the Atlantic.
I finally managed to hook up with S/Y Fairwinds, a steel sailing boat with seven people on-board, eight with me. I immediately liked the crew and the boat (the boat had no auto-helm, so we had to hand steer all the way, which made the whole experience way more authentic).
Getting ready for the crossing
How did you do with the food? where did you store it? what did you eat? How did you do with water?
I remember the preparation for the Crossing as one of the best moments of the whole experience. Besides checking the boat and making sure that everything is ready, you also need to store enough food and water for a long journey.
Food 🥔
The food needs to be enough for the whole crew, for about one month. The fridge on-board in very small or non-existing at all. That means that the type of food to buy needs to be accurately selected.
The first thing to do is a check list of what you already have on-board. it sounds easy but a boat is not an apartment with a kitchen and drawers easily accessible. The food on-board is spread around wherever there is some space. It took several hours to make a list of the food we already had.
Checklist done, it is time to prepare an estimate of the food to buy, which means not only listing the items, but also the quantity for each item.
More important than what to buy is how to store! You do not want to have all the beans in front (or on top) of everything else, unless you are going to eat beans for a whole week 🥫. While sailing, everything moves and it might be hard to empty a closet, to find a specific can! “Smart storing” is essential: any item needs to be easily accessible, cans can go to the back as they will last longer than the rest. Vegetables last no more than one week if well positioned. Enjoy vegetarians meals as long as you can, after that week, any fresh veggie will be a dream 🥝.
Water 🚰
It is a good rule to consider 3 liters of water per day per person, in total, which means that this amount of water will be used for everything, not only for drinking. Normally water is stored in big tanks, so it gets rusty and not so tasty after a few days.
Personal treats 😋
Even though everything on-board is shared for space and organizational reasons, everybody has still some small private space next to his bunk bed. Do not leave it empty! Fill it with the best treats you can get for yourself, to be ready in the most difficult times, cause they will come.
Knowing what you are going to miss is extremely valuable. A simple piece of chocolate 🍫 in the middle of the sea can transform your day into one of the best days of your life. I knew I was going to miss chocolate, clean fresh water to drink, and some teas or chamomile. So I decided to buy some of those stuff for my own and it turned out to be a great idea.
A stopover in Cape Verde ⛰️
Columbus crossed the Ocean from Las Palmas. Some sailors sail some extra miles south to Cape Verde to shorten the actual crossing and make sure that the trade winds (winds that blow from east to west in Atlantic from Autumn till Spring) are stable.
Another reason why stopping in Cape Verde is to discover this beautiful archipelago. We landed in Mindelo at night, after one week of sailing, and stayed there for a week. European food is not well distributed on the island, that is why it is recommended to buy all the food in Las Palmas.
In Mindelo, I managed to learn (more or less) how to kitesurf, for a few money on a stunning beach, 30 min away from the harbor. Hiking on Santo Antao was also a great activity, enjoying stunning views from the top of the volcano’s island.
The crossing: 500 hours of disconnection
On February 15th 2017 we left Mindelo in the afternoon and set sails towards west.
Sailing in the ocean for a few hours is fun. A few days is excitement! One week of sailing is an adventure.
More than 2 weeks becomes spiritual: The experience turns from outside in.
After some time, several important questions started crossing my mind.
Are my relatives and friends still good? What if something has happened to any of my close ones?
In a hyper-connected world, a long disconnection period exposes you to what we have lost in the last years of this race for time: self reflection. As Christopher Bollas explains in his book (Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment) when describing the process of self reflection in our current society:
“The process of exploring the internal world and using reflective thought to unravel unconscious conflicts is clearly too slow — it may even be a hindrance.”
In those 500 hours, from admiring the beauty of the ocean and adventure of sailing, you begin shifting your thoughts, exploring more your inner self: the experience turns from outside in. As Bollas continues describing the situation of our daily existence:
“In place of insight we have sight — albeit analytically informed sight; in place of reflective thought, we have refractive thinking and operational imperatives; in place of carefully constructed vertices of meaning specific to the psychic and lived history of a subject, we have a homogenized being, dynamically amalgamated (and updated) by horizontal objects of thought.”
For how long have you been disconnected in the last 5 years?
Re-experiencing disconnection can be difficult, that is why we can hardly disconnect from the rest of the society for more than a few hours. What I learnt crossing the Atlantic is that it takes weeks, or 500 hours, to really experience again the authenticity of ourselves. It takes a long time and a strong effort, unfortunately, to be back to yourself and to the others around you, to restore hierarchy in your thoughts, and be able to distinguish what is really important to you.
Daily life in the Atlantic
The daily life on-board a small sailing yacht is very simple. Great appreciation for simple things is the quick summary.
- Trading treats 🍪 As i mentioned earlier, it is very important to get some personal treats. Not only because you will need them, but also they will give you the possibility to trade them with others. Everyone has something special (chocolate, tea etc.) that you might crave for. Food runs out very quickly and after a week time you will be left with food in cans 🤢. The following weeks there will be a proper trading market alive 24/7 on-board. Treats become so precious that the value of a byte of chocolate might cost you a round of cleaning ;).
- No more compass, learn to navigate with the stars ⭐ I thought that not having an autopilot was terrible. It was mostly at night, when I had to stick my eyes on the light of the compass, until I found out how to navigate with the stars, instead of staring at the light of the compass. In the beginning you can just locate a group of stars and align them with some reference points, the mast for example. After a few nights with your eyes looking at the stars you can recognize some of them, depending on the time, that can be “followed” to the the way to the West.
- Cinema open air time 🎞️ Sleepless nights spent on a shift were my favorites. The sounds of the ocean are the the best symphony I know. The lights of the stars makes you feel warm and the plankton is always shining there on the surface, giving you good company. Sometimes it was also nice to set up a cozy cinema open air! Some of us had downloaded some movies, so while steering we could watch movies together from a laptop outside.
- Flying fishes, close the hatch 🐟 Flying fishes often jump over at night. Be careful to close all the hatches, if you don’t want one of them to end up on your bunk bed or in the Toilet ;) !
- Fiiiishhhhh!!!! 🎣 Fishing is one of the main activity on-board. Mahi-mahi and tuna are the most common species we caught, but we had some fights with sharks 🦈 and blue marlins as well. Some of us were experienced with fishing and that is how I learnt to kill fishes pouring strong alcohol in their gills: the fish will die in a few seconds, with no spill of blood or useless suffering! With the fish we caught we also managed to make sushi and sashimi 🍣
- Shit happens, be ready for that 🤦 Geir got hit by the boom while we were fishing a big blue marlin, roughly one week away from land. Our captain Fredrik stitched him up and we gave him sum good rum to lessen the pain. Sailing long distance require full attention at any time. But sometimes it is human to loose it. That is the time when the rest of the crew needs to be ready to help!
What is leadership?
When Columbus crossed the Atlantic Ocean, he sailed towards the unknown. Nobody knew what was awaiting him at each new mile sailed. After some weeks in the Atlantic, the compass started giving false direction. The crew, exhausted, threatened the captain to get into mutiny. Columbus was in the same situation: He had no idea on what was next, if there was land nor where they were going. But he had the ability to negotiate two more days. The third day they did not see land, but they spotted some flying birds 🕊️. That was enough to make the crew believe into some kind of existence of land and keep sailing to what we called America today.
The flying birds were the trigger to convince the crew: the proof of existence of something alive. Columbus knew his crew well, and that was the key to be able to negotiate two more days. He had a strong empathy towards his crew, the skill that today true leaders are required to have, as we all learn it in expensive leadership courses.
People, as in any activity in life, are always the main part of the experience. I would have not learnt so much if I had crossed the Ocean by myself. Probably I would have learnt more about sailing, not about other people. Being for a relatively long period of time, in a restricted environment, with the rest of the crew, allowed me to work on my empathy as well. This exercise takes time, as I wrote before; As today everyone is extremely focused on his own, we are all loosing our capability to deeply understand others. Considering the society we live in, dedicating some time to understand the others’ feelings sounds too time expensive. Nobody is willing to do that.
Empathy, the ability to understand others’ feelings, is becoming a rare exercise. Without empathy there is no deep exchange. The thinking becomes horizontal, as Bollas explains, flattening the value of our hierarchically thoughts. Being disconnected for 500 hours becomes a huge effort.
What will I be missing out in those 500 hours?
That would probably be the main worry of the majority of people affected by FOMO in our society.
I prefer to turn the question around.
I ask myself what I have already missed out by not spending time reflecting on deep matters, rather than scrolling the social media walls or posting a solitary selfie taken from distance, as if I were in good company.
What about my solo-sailor dream?
My original dream of travelling alone around the world vanished after my experience across the Atlantic. It did not vanish because of the experience of sailing, in fact I love sailing even more now! It faded away as I realized that human feelings are too important to be left behind, on the dock of a harbor.
