A Sailor's Point of View

Offshore Explorer with Scott Dodgson

Oceanic travel by passenger ship began ending when Airlines Pan Am announced regular transatlantic flights in 1945. Travel by plane changed the very essence of the traveler’s psychology and the fundamental experience of a different place. We travel to learn and grow. Curiosity drives our quest to see the next port, to look around the bend, to climb the mountain top, and sail to the edge of the horizon. Our travel experience informs our understanding of our place on earth and the relationship of places in ourselves. Traveling provides the contrast to our normal. A different place makes this place, your place, your home understandable. How we are prepared to experience our travel has fundamentally changed since flying became open to all who could afford a ticket. We have lost the benefits of preparation and thus lost the ability to comprehend the nuanced aspects of travel both interior and exterior.

With air travel, we no longer wait in a heightened state of anticipation over discovering that distant place. Honestly, the wait is about discovering that far-off place in our soul. No long evenings on the deck of a massive ship watching sunrises and sunsets, where the only entertainment is playing shuffleboard, conversing with fellow travelers to glean inside information about the best restaurants, reliable drivers, clean hotels, crime, shopping, history and a variety of other subjects needing to grasp the contours of the new place. Our vanity demands a world-weary appearance cover our innocence as if they will sanction us for our lack of experience. Air travel excluded the long periods of wonderfully anxious and sumptuous anticipation. Waiting is something we sailors do well as we have no choice given the speed at which we travel. Some travelers are pressed for time, limited by funds, limited by vacation time from work, wanting to skip the first big step and get to the heart of the vacation. The casual traveler wants to be transported from his comfortable chair at home to the steps of the Roman coliseum as seamlessly as changing channels on their flat screen television. No sweat. No hassle. No experience? Seen it. Ate it. Hiked it. Slept in it. That will do, thank you very much, but I have to be back at work tomorrow. The experience of place washed away within days of returning home, leaving little or no impression of that place on their minds or soul. What is the point of travel if you are not willing to be fashioned by the place even a little?

Sailing to a place involves an entirely different psychological and physical dynamic for the earnest and open traveler/sailor. Passenger ships and cruise ships offer a hint of the maritime experience. Modern cruise ship experience has been so honed to entertaining the passive traveler it is hard to see how getting off the ship at a port of call has anything to do with the authentic experience of travel other than to pry dollars from your hands for trinkets. Trinkets you use as a reminder of having been there. There is no dynamic experience, no moment of realization, no conversation with your soul or reminders of your place in the continuum of humanity. You are left with sad little trinkets and a reminder of a lost opportunity.

Sailing is a physical and mind-altering experience of dimensions rarely understood, even by local sailors. Lauded through time, a sailor’s experience informed the homebound. Travel changed their being. Regardless of education or age, they wore their foreign experience like so many tattoos, a traveling corporeal pictographic. The sailor is a portal to the world.

What I am describing is very real but largely forgotten. Travel by sail is a unique experience that prepares you in wonderful ways to enter a world, unfamiliar in culture, language, and custom, yet to find an honest kinship with the inhabitants because of your confident awareness. The physical and emotional preparations inherent in sailing across the ocean make you different. The sailor’s point of view was once a common entity that allowed one to see the world and be in the world at once with a sublime understanding. The sailor's experiences, the history, the people and their customs, their art, their industry, their desires, likes and loves all become vividly apparent as the sailor immerses himself or herself in the sea of life.

I am that sailor and here are the stories, large and small from a sailor’s point of view.

What is the sailor’s point of view? How does one achieve that awareness and perception?

Sailing slows the perception of time, allowing the mind to be in the present tense. There is nothing a sailor can do about the past and the future is a waypoint in the distance. He is obligated to be in the present and face whatever tasks the boat and ocean throw at him or her. Time is experienced in a way most people who farm, which was just about everyone on earth. Distance determines time. Plow that field from dawn until dusk and that was your measurement of a day. One’s awareness of distance traveled is heightened. An example of that mind bending phenomenon is when it snows for example. Driving to work takes 20 minutes at 60 mph on a dry day. It snows and you creep along at 20 mph and 2 very slow hours pass. At this point you realize distance as another measurement of time. Sailing obliterates your sense of time much the same way.

This wonderful state of simply “Being,” the body experiences something akin to 24/7 of yoga. The body adjusts to the rolling deck swinging back and forth until it becomes second nature or as I like to say the original nature. It must be the same type of experience as being in the womb.

At this point in your voyage, you have attained a degree of preparation. Mentally, you are very much present. Physically, your body has been transformed into feeling fluid and aware. You are ready to experience a new place with heightened senses and acute awareness. You are a sailor.

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