Scribbles

‘Gojnobuutn? Diknbucht!’, the skipper of the fishing vessel shouted in our dialect, as we passed him in the harbour of Nieuwpoort yesterday. The instructor we had on board our ship did not understand a word of it. Even though he speaks Dutch, and lives only sixty kilometers away, he does not understand our dialect. It could just as well have been Chinese to him. ‘Gojnobuutn? Diknbucht!’.. The fisherman was warning us of the fog at sea.

We were out sailing on the Belgian coast. Loreena McKennitt’s music was playing. It is my home-coming music. It made me think: “Despite all the exotic traveling I do, I always come back to this place.” And ‘by this place’ I do not mean Belgium, nor the region where we live at the moment. No, the place that feels home like no other is the area I was born and raised, the coastal region of Belgium, where we were sailing yesterday. My roots.

Jacques Brel –remember, the famous Belgian singer-songwriter you had never heard of?- made a song about my roots: ‘Le plat pays qui est le mien’, he called it. Literally, ‘the flat land that is mine’… This flat land is a coastline of only sixty kilometers long, stretching from the French to the Dutch border, with England about fifty-sixty kilometers on the other side of the Northsea.

Every time I go there, I feel moved deep down inside. No matter what the season is. It can be stormy with massive dark threatening clouds and strong south-westerly winds gusting over the coastal planes, pushing so hard most trees grow, bent into one direction.
Or the white crispy clean beauty of frost and light snow, where you have the impression your breath will freeze in your noose.
Or baking hot blue skies, converting the whole sixty kilometers of coastline into one gigantic pool for millions of people, coming to seek freshness in the sea. The sea that welcomes them with a cool breeze and tumbling waves. At those times, the whole coastline is one feast of happiness, and terraces, and music on the beach, with parties and fireworks in the evenings.

Sometimes, a lot of times, the sky is grey. As you stand on the sand dunes which make a large part of the coast, you can look over the flat horizon: the fair almost white sand glides over into the sea, which is almost just as white. The waves reflect the cap of low clouds and mist, making the panorama one transition of shades of white and light-grey.

Sometimes the clouds are so heavy the light wind can not carry them anymore, and the moisture sinks down over the land, creating heavy mist, like we had yesterday. The people then say: ” ‘t is voe te snien”, literally “you could cut it”, so thick the mist could be. It happens you can not even see two meters in front of you. Then the sound would be muffled, echoed, and carries much further than usual. This makes everything confusing. And wet… Especially wet.. The mist would drip off your face and clothes, and off the tree branches. If you are real silent then, you can hear the drops create a weird, short and soft dripdroptiktok, echo-t all around, as if you would be surrounded by thousands of fairytale-d invisible dwarfs tiptoeing around you. It is then, this land of mine whispers its mystic and old stories. Legends about the people who lived there in a dark past. It is then the music of Loreena McKennitt comes to its full right.

It is a land of stubborn people. Traditionally keeping things to themselves. Speaking a Flemish dialect nobody else understands, rich in sounds with an ‘undertone’ of things that people do not say but rather think. Only to be read by the tone in which things are said..
‘Gojnobuutn? Diknbucht!’ the skipper of the fishing vessel had shouted at us. Literally he said ‘Going outside? Fat junk’. What he meant was ‘Are you going to sea? The fog is very thick’.

Our language is a dialect, a mixture of Dutch, French and English words often bastardized and changed into new words hardly showing their roots. Only people here, at the coast, speak it. Nobody else understands us. It is a language of all possible verbal sounds and intonations, making it sound funny. Even to this day, when I talk to Tine in our Flemish dialect, no ‘outsider’ can understand. Not even someone who lives only sixty kilometers further inland, like our trainer on the boat.

This is a land of people conquered and ruled by many nations, but they did not mind, they were independent at heart and in spirit. The Romans conquered, then the Saxons, the Franks, the French, then we came under Austrian rule, later Spanish and Dutch, until they had no clue anymore what to do with us, so they made us an independent country. We became a buffer state between “the big players” at the time: Holland, England, Germany and France.. Even after our independence, we came under German rule twice. We actually stopped the invasion of the Germans during the World War I at the very place we were moored yesterday, in Nieuwpoort: the lockmaster had purposely opened up the locks at springtide, and flooded a huge part of the country, making it impossible for the Germans to progress. They got stuck for 4 years, in the mud. No matter we had to drown most of our homes, the invaders were stopped! Once again, the sea had played its predominant rule in our history…

It is the sea that made the land what it is. The sea that gives and takes. The great plane, the great adventure, the symbol of travel, of limitless, of the unknown, of death and of life, of beginning and ends. The sea that can be as calm as a lake, and as raging as a nightmare. With huge waves, breaking everything in its way. Rolling in fast, and deep, chewing at the dunes, carrying away the sand on the beach, and at times dropping off whole vessels on shore.

The land of mine is very flat. Sometimes below sea level even several kilometers inland… Long ago, at every high tide, the sea would reverse the current in the rivers and streams, making them stream inland, and through a meshed natural system of saltwater creeks and marshy reservoirs, fill up all the waterways inland, sometimes as far as thirty km.. It would do this twice per day. And twice per day, the water would run back to the sea. Every six hours, the creeks and marshes would fill and run dry again. Well, they were never totally dry as the land was mainly marsh land. Filled with wild-life, and wild-people. You needed to be a special breed to survive here, living off the land, exposed to the elements. It was also the land of robbers and pirates. Fishermen, farmers, traders. But above all, of opportunists, and pragmatists.

As the land slopes ever so lightly into the sea, the sea has always been very treacherous. Loads of sandbanks off the coast, creating dangerous currents. On the shore we had ‘viertorn’, literary: “fire towers” (lighthouses), made in stone, where they would light a bonfire on the flat roof. At night, it would be the beacon to the entrance of the ports for the fishing vessels and trading vessels, bringing wealth to this area. But pirates would light bonfires on the beaches and in the dunes, luring vessels onto the beaches, where they would be plundered, stripped of anything with value. The currents, sandbanks, pirates, and dense sea traffic made this coast difficult to navigate. Yet many came to its ports, at we made the world’s finest decorative carpets in those times. And sold the finest wool, cotton, lace and linen. It was where good seaworthy ships were made, and where you could sell or buy anything.. What the Khyber pass on the Silk Route was in the East, we were to Western Europe in the Middle Ages.

But the sea gave and the sea took away. The sea slipped dry the main trading port of Bruges, which was twenty kilometers inland, by depositing more sand than what could be cleared, and the economy declined..

It was difficult to survive in those days. The towns along the coast were flooded every year.. My hometown was on a strip of land, a long stretched peninsula, sticking out into the sea. There was a west end, an east end and a church in the middle, and that is how they called the towns. West-end, East-end, Middle-church: Westende, Oostende, Middelkerke.. The sea took this strip of land, in one go, in one flood, drowning thousands. The land, the towns, disappeared into the sea.. The towns were later rebuilt further inland, under the same name, but the old land, we never saw again. Still today, the fishermen claim to hear the church bell from ‘Middelkerke’ clinging on the sea bottom, luring ignorant vessels onto the sand banks. Maybe that is why the area is littered with hundreds and hundreds of wrecks…

Because of its stubborn people, and the wild nature, these areas were very difficult to travel through. Roads would be flooded, and easily washed away. Even if the roads were there, the bush around it was so thick, anyone could hide, ready to rob any convoy. If it was not for the robbers, people would go out of their minds, scared to death, crossing the marshes as the legends filled the creeks and wetlands with scare-devils, curses and myths. They were not stories, they were part of the beliefs of people. Told father to son, mother to daughter. It would be given to the child together with the mother milk. It would be encapsulated in songs, and dances, and story telling evenings by the fireplaces.

I am a son of this land. It is so much a part of me. Like a magnet, it can draw me back. No matter how far I have gone on the earth, there is only one place I need to come, to feel home, and at ease. It is like migrating birds are, through some strange magnetic fields, compass-ed to their destination, I always come back. It looks like the start and the destination of my Road, reminding me it is the road I have to enjoy.

Samples of the music mentioned in this story (.wma): Loreena McKennitt , Le Plat Pays
My home area: Realtime peep through a webcam at the Flemish coast

December 9, 2006. – In the Middle of Nowhere.

Dear J.,

We have been at sea for a while now. I am gradually getting into a mood, where I feel more than just ‘at sea’. I feel at home, in harmony with everything around me. At those moments, it is as if I feel the ship talking. It is more sounds rather than words. At times, I hear her giggling when she loves the excitement of a fast sail. I hear her hum a melody when she is happy with the sail settings and the wind. There are times where I hear her cry when something is wrong, when the swell and low winds make her sail flap and the boom bang to and fro.

Last night I was woken up when she was crying in pain, and screaming. The winds were low, and the side-swell had her boom bang every 10 seconds. . The ship shivered with every smack of the sails. The foresail emptied and filled again with a loud whack like a giant whip. She was tormented.
I came on deck to find the crew on watch chatting. They had not really noticed the banging. I gave them a piece of my mind ‘can’t you tell, she is hurting?’. They gave me an awkward look as if to say ‘What are you talking about?’. I hooked on my lifeline and went onto the foredeck, tightened the ropes of the headsail, changed the course harder into the wind, and trimmed the main sail to avoid the banging. The winds were low, maybe 6 or 7 knots. The swell was 2-3 meters high, rolling in from the side..

I put on some soft classical music in the cockpit, to soothe her spirit. I emptied my mind and sniffed the wind, closed my eyes. As the music went up in rhythm, I could feel the ship talking to the wind, and the wind whispering back. It was like they made a pact. The wind gradually picked up, sending shivers down my spine. The hair on my arms and legs stood straight up. I could just feel that I was in tune with it all. And everything was in tune with me. The wind picked up, gradually, bit by bit, and over half an hour, it was up to the ideal speed of 20 knots. With every push of the wind, I could feel the ship starting to sing and leap forward. She giggled with every push. I took the wheel and made her surf on the waves. She sung for me. Out of joy.

This did not happen once, but several times, where I came on deck, or on watch, and the wind was low, or from a foul angle. Every time, I could get into tune with the elements and it was as if I could have the swell, the wind change, to make the ship happy, singing again. It was so obvious that often when I came on deck, sometimes the crew on watch sighed ‘oh ok, now we will get wind again. Make us some wind again, Peter.’. And every time, I could blank my mind, and get into tune with the elements, and get the right balance again of wind, ship, swell and sails… Often, I could see on the instruments the wind had fallen right down again when I went off shift. Sometimes in a matter of minutes after I went below deck… Weird stuff, no?

She loves me, this ship. She loves what I do to her. She loves it when I switch off the autopilot and steer her manually.
The crew jokes about it: ‘The ship, she likes her little machine -the autopilot-, but she likes Peter’s hand job much, much more!’. )

Sometimes I think ‘I lost it’, but more and more I get convinced ‘I just found it’..

What do you think? Haha

Love,

Peter

Top picture courtesy of Thomas Mallet

ARC 2006 – Sailing Vessel Persuader Too.
Log entry December 3, 2006 – Transatlantic crossing, day #7.

For days, we have not seen another ship. On Saturday all of sudden a vessel popped up at the horizon. We locked her on the radar and observed she was not moving at all. It was a fishing vessel, which looked like hovering on one spot. We were speeding on our massive green kite, autopilot set to follow the wind, about 155 degrees off wind, a course that brought us heading straight for the fishing vessel. – is it not odd, that for days on end you don’t see any other ship, and when one is spotted, it always seems to be on a collision course? –

Anyway, there she was, just hovering on one position, not moving at all. She did not drag any fishing gear, just ‘lay there’. We called them on the radio, in English, No response. In French. No response. In Portuguese. No response. In Spanish. No response.. It was not until we raced past her, a hundred meters off her bow, that all of a sudden we heard a voice on the radio. It seemed the crew only saw us the moment we passed her.. The guy on the radio sounded surprised… Probably he was on watch on the bridge, and had dozed off, until he saw us speeding by. I mean, put yourself in his place, here you are, in the middle of the Atlantic, minding your own business, not seeing anyone or anything for days on end and all of a sudden, this sailboat with this massive green sail comes racing past you..

Anyway, they were very friendly. They were Portuguese fishermen (what is a Portuguese fishing vessel doing so far south in the middle of nowhere, we wonder?). They asked who we were, where we were going to.. We answered we were on our way ‘to Saint Lucia’.. And he said ‘but you are going the wrong way, Santa Lucia is behind you..’. It took us some time to explain we were not going to ‘La Ilha de Santa Luzia’, one of the islands in the Cape Verdes – indeed now one day off our stern – but to St.Lucia in the Caribbean..
So we parted, with the fishing vessel left in our wake. We were wondering what the hell a Portuguese fishing vessel was doing so far south, just hovering on the spot in the mid Atlantic. And they were probably wondering what a sailing vessel was doing crossing the Atlantic only to go from one from one St.Lucia to the other St.Lucia.

Looking back… Video courtesy of Thomas Mallet
Click (twice) on video to play it.
.

November 26, 2006 – Just off the coast of the Canary Islands

I arrived back in the Canary Islands two days ago. In the marina, all ships participating in the ARC, the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers, had assembled. 223 ships from different nationalities. From 27 feet (9 meters) to 100 feet (over 30 meters) monsters. From homemade boats to big luxurious one-off designs. From competition racing boats with little luxury to standard cruising yachts like ours. The ARC is an annual event trying to assemble yachts at the ideal time of the year to sail across the Atlantic. The purpose is to get everyone safely to ‘the other end’, in a competitive way. The people participating are from all kinds of walks of life. Some are professional skippers taking their charter ship over to the Caribbean for the season (like us), with a random crew often consisting of people who never crossed the Atlantic before. Some are competition boats with a well trained racing crew on board. Some are families, many of them from Europe where the ARC is their first trans-ocean crossing of a multi-year world cruise, often with kids on board. There was a pleasant and hectic atmosphere on all the docks as all ships were readied for the crossing. Everyone was busy stocking food, fuel, water, and making last minute repairs or changes to their ship.

This morning, one by one the yachts left the marina, cheered by thousands of people who stood on the cays, docks and breakwaters or ferried in small boats around us. Helicopters above, filming, and brass bands playing on the docks. Together with the 223 ARC participating yachts, there would be about 250 ‘ghost riders’, yachts which would cross the Atlantic at the same time as us, but did not participate in the ARC. We all gathered just outside of the port, zigzagging while raising sails, trying to get a good position near the one km long starting line. Once the start signal was given, up went all the big spinnakers (the huge colourful sails which are used to sail down- wind). The start was one of the most memorable pictures I will never forget… Over 200 boats starting a race at the same time. And not only a race, a transatlantic crossing but also starting an adventure, chasing dreams. Even though we will often sail hundreds of miles apart from the other boats, we are still connected to one another, because of our common goal, our common dreams, our common interests, all to do with adventure, water, sailing and being addicted to the horizon.. It was an absolute fabulous sight, hundreds of boats and sails, and thousands of crew working on them.. All heading into the same direction: St.Lucia in the Caribbean.

Wish us luck and fair winds!

Peter