24 August 2007 | Papeete, Tahiti
Hello Bahati Virtual Mates,

As we write you, we are approaching our first city since leaving Panama, more than two months ago, on June 8. As BAHATI glides through a clear night with brisk tradewinds and rocking seas, we prepare ourselves to enter the bustling South Pacific metropolis of Papeete, Tahiti. Once at anchor it will be a mad rush to accomplish a myriad of tasks, and catching up with old friends, before we kick out to the magical Polynesian islands of Moorea and Bora Bora.

Our last week in the Tuamotus was lovely. We spent our time relaxing in the giant lagoon at Kauehi, a giant atoll with a tiny welcoming village. While at anchor in the bright blue and green waters we spent lots of time visiting with friends aboard EMPIRE (Eivind, Heidi, and Peder, who just rounded Cape Horn) and DON QIJOTE (Inga and Johan, a young Scandinavian couple on a 28 foot sloop). We snorkeled together, scuba dived, ate and ate. One beautiful evening we celebrated Michael’s birthday (a free Bahati hat to the first one to guess his age!), with pizza, cake, and drink. We visited a local pearl farm, owned and operated by Tiaihau a Tiaihau (see photos), who we dubbed “The King”� since he also owned the local store and the concession stand at the airport where a small plane lands once a week.

It was a wonderful week of much relaxing, and we were sad to see our time in the Tuamotus be so short. But, it’s a big ocean to cross, and we have to be in Tonga by September to meet out incoming crew for the passage down to New Zealand. So off we go!

We have been promising you pictures for months now. We are finally in reach of internet, so here they are! There are four galleries. The Galapagos, The Crossing, The Marquesas, and The Tuamotus. You can visit them at this link: http://picasaweb.google.com/jwarrenwhite

In place of a travel memoir/history/political economy lesson of the area, this log we�?’??”?ve opted to share with you a more personal side of Bahati�?’??”?s crew. Michael Callahan, who’s been onboard since St Lucia about 7 months ago (with a stint with his family back in the US, while we were stuck in Panama), has been so gracious as to share with all of us some of his reflections of the last couple months at sea. Enjoy.

As always, we love hearing from you: wdd4252@sailmail.com

“Many a slip twixt cup and lip”

Out here in the South Pacific, life is elemental, expansive. We are a sliver of Archimedean quick math calibrating the cardinal directions with the sun, wind, undulating water, rhumbline and way point. Starting out there is always the Point A to Point B of things, but as soon as the anchor is weighed, the logistics of passage slowly unfurl into the unknown journey, the seeking of soul.

In this great amphitheater of sea and sky the captain directs his cast with lines and canvas that harness nature’s fickle virtuosity. He is a dramatist in setting the stage. He raises the curtain: mainsail, jib, staysail, spinnaker, and paces the foredeck deciphering signs, tracing friction’s genecology, reading the future in chafe, brooding over the unforeseen didactics of the sea, always teaching, always humbling. His mephistophelian eyebrows, an evolutionary trait passed down through generations of sealorn nomads, pique like a wind vane as the breeze shifts. “Come up five degrees, trim the genoa, tighten the boom break.” And so goes our floating production: an ensemble of improvisation, a comedy of errors.

Everything slips off the face of the horizon, unmappable, a turn out of view. At sea level the world contracts into a seven mile circle, sparkling with 108,000 deceptions. Atavisms present themselves in plain sight: why of course the earth is flat! Can I pierce the horizon, this thin corridor of language, my aquarium understanding of the sea, and raise the sheet on this infinitely varied monotony? Listen. Smell. Taste. Feel. Wait. There are counterpoints that blur and relieve the unfathomable oblivion of blue: the pale underside of terns, the wispy curtain of cirrostratus clouds, the silvery chimera of flying fish, the pearly froth of whitecaps, the yellowfin’s fading eye.

This desolate beauty, the plaything of Sirens, takes the shape of your desire. In its seduction there is always a shipwreck warning. As dusky clouds pile high, trimmed by an impossible shock of golden light, my city eyes linger too long, and that cathedral of airmount brilliance forms the running dog mouth of a squall. Bahati heels heavily leeward with bone drenched force then steadies in ballast. Even after crossing the Equator, I am still a pollywog conjuring a carapace.

Time peels off like a rotten banana. Thoughts decay, old skins molt, my most intimate stories slacken like a breathless spinnaker. And out of this burrowing shipworm solitude comes the play of Pacific light and hour, the rise and fall of the ship, the thermodynamics of convection, sail and airfoil, the phases of the moon. Am I a sailor? A vessel of I? Or just an eddy, a jetsam of thought, in larger pools of energy still.

As the days heap one on top of another my body becomes fallow, lion lazy, prideless. My hands and feet calloused, my face weathered a saline patina; the oceanic vastness tempered on the helot’s anvil of chore and watch. My movements reduced to their bare essential: I scrub, tie knots, cook, knead, bake, rig, hoist, trim sails, and study my mutinous thoughts, my barometric moods. I, too, am subject to the chafe of time. Scars heal in topographies of labor.

Incipient night: the diurnal sky closes its cranberry eyelid and rolls its orange iris in the back of its head. The universe sighs: its skin blushing crimson pleasure. As shadows amass, tradewinds whisper their blue-black Illiads. In the prophetic half-light, ancient memories surface in dirges of sorrowful whale song. The pelagic blue, so glacial and shafted in its high sun depths, darkens its material in the well of indifferent volume. Halyards chime.

Night watch marks my hours alone. The moon rises and prowls the length of gravity’s chain evoking its dark, tidal art. The sea licks Bahati with bioluminescent tongue. I peer over the side at the cold metal table of the sea. Its coroner’s glance the repository of my darkest thoughts, my deepest uncertainties. Ghost sharks circle my mind. How much do I actually know myself? Are things ever what they seem? Do I look at life the same way I gaze upon a dead star, only perceiving the bend of memory’s distant beam?

Watch ends, I go below deck, make a log entry, awaken Josh, and stumble to bed. I lay down in my forcastle womb to the lapping sounds of amniotic fluid. The bow-parted water loosens my grip one finger at a time, I sink into the long caress of night. I dream fallopian dreams. Faces float by in the flickering rays of a projected life. My eyes slowly register that the light is coming from a torch which illumines the ruined gate of a watery cemetery. The partially submerged sign at the entrance reads: “Each man kills the thing he loves.”

Tired of turning away, I descend, rootless, into catacombs of coral I’ve been too scared to enter. There I suck on the bone of sensation like a barnacle, but the marrow is not mine. The undertow takes me out beyond the reef, to the waking shark’s mouth. There I drift in the red glow of placental fear; a heart beats in the distance. Is life or death taking me? I am suddenly yanked back by the umbilical chord of the watch schedule.

At the helm I drift in a peri-conscious state. The constant motion, the in and out of sleep, and plundering sun reveal the porousness of I. The hot, bitter coffee makes me aware of the blood coursing through my brain. I scan the horizon for running lights, study the instruments, and confirm the nothingness of night. I step out from under the bimini and bleed out into a larger Circadian, my circle of Willis awash in structures of arterial light. At these moments I know grace.

Land falls heavy on my forgetful eyes. Faku Hiva’s precipitous cliffs descend from heaven in violent ferric slashes. Smoky volcanic protrusions guard verdant hibiscus valleys, like a black-lipped oyster its pearl. Coal-colored waves break aquamarine, leaving pools of jade in its wake. The scorpion fish fans its house of splendor. Above, white tropic birds create negative space with broad strokes of their long, delicate paintbrush tails: bringing out blues, greens, and siennas in the calligraphy of swoop and ascent. The anchor rattles over the bow finding ground that only yesterday was beyond its scope.

Many things are gone. The sea takes as much as it gives. I lay frangipani upon those shores lost, and with courage, begin, and begin again.