Crew-mate's Log - by Francois

Translation of newbie's notebook :

Sunday, May 3rd – Sunday, May 10th: inside Kintaro’s belly, out on the Pacific

Well, the rough start never stopped being rough. Me, I’m on the 2-to-6 watches. Daytime. Nighttime. During my first watch, everybody stays on deck because nobody’s feeling too great. Ben says seasickness meds are kinda shit anyway, and they slow your body adapting. So me, being the good little sailor, I do what the captain does. Except the captain starts puking everywhere. Jesus Christ. Three heaves and a bucket. Celery puke too. Fucking nasty.

Me, I’m holding up… kinda… while Lizzie struggles to dump the contents of the bucket overboard. I’m proud of myself though — I make it through my watch. At 6 p.m., Ben takes over. The swell calms down exactly zero percent. Proper 5–6 meter stuff. Chaotic as hell. Waves straight in the face. The bastards.

Me, I need sleep, so I crawl into my bunk. But to do that you’ve gotta climb down into Kintaro’s belly. And inside Kintaro’s belly, it’s like inside mine. Everything gurgling like mad. I’m banging into everything, can’t keep steady. Still, I manage to lie down. And then comes the tragedy. The bile rising. Suddenly I rediscover perfect balance just long enough to stagger back on deck.

And schbleurgh.

Right into the captain’s bucket. Same thing all over again.

Ben’s got some solid advice for me. He tries to say something but… it doesn’t come out. Or rather, it’s not the advice coming out. And re-schbleurgh.

I’ll spare you the full picture. We become bucket brothers. The atmosphere settles onboard: convalescence. We keep our heading anyway. Besides, the tea-room customs office wouldn’t let us back in now.

And it lasts like that. Three days. Not always quite that intense, but the same shared drunken misery. Because that’s what seasickness is: some kind of endless intoxication that never wears off. Except you’ve also got the dehydration headache. So you’re drunk and hungover. At the same time.

At that point I hate my life.

Everybody’s wrecked. Lizzie says she’s rarely seen anything like it. But she’s not puking. She took seasickness pills. Maybe that was the advice Ben couldn’t quite deliver. So I stop the dick-measuring contest and take the damn pill. I take said damn pill the following evening.

Though honestly, even with that, the nauseous drunkenness settles in nice and deep. Because over three days, do you think the sea calms down??

Hell no.

The bitch.

It gets bigger.

Waves. Aaaaaall the time.

I’ve never felt so sick at sea. I puked up my afternoon snack and my midnight snack too. Banged myself against everything, slept in salty sheets… We’re exhausted. And I’m not handling it much worse than the other two. They crossed the whole Pacific from the Panama Canal last year. They’d never felt that awful in swell before. To be fair, the forecast had looked pretty mild. Tough luck for us.

So from Sunday to Tuesday night, that’s what the ocean is: a drunken boat full of drunk sailors. I barely see time passing because basically I’m either on watch, forcing myself every fifteen minutes to scan the horizon between two semi-comas, or I’m asleep in my bunk getting absolutely battered by that fucking swell slamming me into everything. Even lying down.

Lizzie cleans up the puke. Including one legendary bucket-of-friendship incident where Ben somehow managed to redecorate the entire bathroom while trying to help dump it overboard. Lizzie’s heroic. Mid-exorcism while handling her own seasick drunkenness.

Everything is hard on this rust bucket…

But when everything is hard, you end up taking pride in completely stupid little things. Well… “advantage” isn’t the word. Consolation, maybe.

Like brushing your teeth.

Doesn’t sound very complicated, right? Brushing your teeth.

Well first you’ve gotta grab the toothbrush without sending everybody’s toiletry bags flying across the bathroom. Which is already an achievement. And yet… after two straight days of vomiting, brushing your teeth stops being a luxury and becomes something close to salvation.

So when you’ve picked up the same nail clippers and hair ties you dropped all over the floor for the third time, you start losing your mind a bit. Because you already spent aaaall your endurance dealing with nausea, and now you’ve gotta climb back up to the cockpit before you puke everywhere again.

So you abort the mission.

Twice.

And when you finally manage to brush your fucking teeth… you feel proud. Like genuinely proud. And fresh, on top of that.

So showers and toilets… don’t even get me started. Pumping your own shit into the ocean while feeling like the bowl might overflow with the next big wave. Pure poetry.

Basically I’m regressing. I’m proud of brushing my teeth and using the potty. I’m two and a half years old, for fuck’s sake.

And then Wednesday comes…

The swell’s still heavy. But my body must’ve decided it was enough already. I don’t really understand the miracle involved, but I sober up. The sea’s still moving like an absolute bastard, but I feel alive again. Same for Ben and Lizzie.

The wind shifted hard and pushed us off course. Ben recalculates the route. Him too — heroic in his own drunken haze. Handling sails and all the technical navigation stuff while I was mostly trying to maintain the bare minimum of human dignity.

Meanwhile I keep learning how to sail. The hard way. Learning how to compromise between keeping course and keeping the boat in the wind. Learning the weird rhythm of the sea.

Wednesday’s also the day we finally eat again.

“We become human again,” as Ben puts it.

And after that, well… we’re just on a boat, moving forward. Slowly. Between 5 and 7 knots. 7 when it’s really blowing hard. Up until Thursday we’re soaked most of the time because waves keep breaking over the cockpit and drenching us properly. I get hit by squalls too.

When the wind picks up, the sailboat heels way over to port. Pretty sporty.

And there’s nothing on the horizon. Nothing at all. You’d think we were the only idiots left on the Pacific.

Not much happens. Watches. Daytime. Nighttime. We eat and laugh. Talk sometimes.

What’s funny is I’m not tired. Then again, we spend most of our time lying around doing absolutely nothing. Watching the horizon and the imagination of clouds. It’s crazy how fascinating clouds become. No internet. Barely five minutes to message loved ones. No reading either — otherwise instant puke.

Just… long time.

I feel like I’m recovering from something. Don’t really know what. But it’s a sick man’s rhythm — medically speaking. And not necessarily in a bad way. More like somebody healing.

We keep our course.

At night there are stars. Shooting stars too. And sunsets. Beautiful ones.

Thursday the autopilot dies. The sea’s calmed down by then. Ben and Lizzie fix it while I hand-steer through the night. I kinda enjoy it. Feels a little bit like being discount Jack Sparrow. Though after fifteen minutes I’m already praying they finish fixing the thing. Gotta admit autopilot’s more relaxing.

Friday, same story again. I’m actually not too bad at holding a course. But Ben and Lizzie start feeling rough again after hours spent with their heads buried in machinery under a steadier but still heavy swell.

And then things calm down again.

It’s long.

We almost never get bored, though sometimes we come close. So I start watching the waves like huge rolling hills endlessly coming and going. Kintaro climbs them and slides back down the other side.

At night, when I try to sleep, it feels like lying on the back of some enormous creature moving forward. I wouldn’t call it graceful. During the first days it felt more like a giant toad gathering momentum and going splash-splash from wave to wave. A huge lazy toad.

And when the swell turns smooth, it feels more like riding on the back of a bird gliding from massif to massif, playing with rising winds.

Saturday’s hot and sunny. The sea is calm. We should arrive at Minerva Reef on Sunday the 10th. We’ll stay there a few days, explore, dive wrecks.

I can’t really tell whether I feel good.

I think I do.

At least it’s definitely not a no.

Funny kind of time.

Sunday, I finish my night watch surrounded by phosphorescence, and the sun is beginning to rise just as I go to bed.