"The floggings will continue until the morale improves!"

I've been in Bodo for one week now and the boat is still not in the water. Bodo itself is nice, with beautiful scenery, nice people, and pleasant cafes and pubs that stay open very late because of the 24 hour a day light. But the experience aboard Gitana has been entirely different.

Mike Johnson is Gitana's skipper. He's a sixty-three year old man with a booming voice and a face well weathered by years at sea. Grey hair that may have once fallen down into a pony tail has thinned and retreated to higher latitudes. His eyes are steel blue and he has enormous hands that do not shake. He stands 6'4" tall and has a lean build. He has dined in Cuba with Gregorio Fuentes--Twice. (C.f. Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea"-Fuentes is the real life "old man"that inspired the novel). He gets a rise out of waking his crew up every morning by playing an old Edith Piaff tape loudly over Gitana's PA...."Non, je ne regrette rien...."

But the most important thing you need to know about Skipper Michael Joseph Johnson is that he is a hardass. Mike spent six years with the U.S. Army paratroopers in the early 1960's before moving to the UK where he worked as a boson (boatswain) training RAF recruits on British merchant ships. He is the only American to ever have done anything like this--work for a branch of the British navy without actually being a citizen. His knowledge and skill aboard ship is matched only by his eagerness to play the role of skipper, a role that seems to remind him of his place in the world and also one that satisfies his need to impose some sort of order in his life and within the lives of those aboard his vessel. There is a stoic discipline to Skipper Mike that can be mistaken as cruelty or callousness. But the moment you step off the boat and into a more casual setting the power-distance dimension vanishes and you are spending time with one of the coolest dudes you'll ever meet.

Unfortunately for me, however, my time with Mike Johnson over the past four days has been entirely aboard Gitana. Shortly after Piaff (see above) and a cup of what Mike likes to call "Cowboy Coffee," I have been ascending topside in my foul weather gear and rubber boots and immediately falling to my knees where I remain all day--scrubbing Gitana's teak wood deck with steel wool and small brushes. My hands are bubbled up with blisters from sun (don't read this part mom) and my knees are scraped up, but the past few days getting intimate with teak has awakened a new spirituality (or at the very least, humbleness) in me. I've been thinking quite a bit about the spirituality of posture while srubbing. What was at first an unintentional genuflection has become an outward manifestation of a faith in a Power that I believe has sent me to this remote place of Norway aboard a ship run by a captain who might be crazy by all normal standards.

Perhaps Skipper Michael Joseph Johnson's stoicism derives from an early and complete understanding of this kind of physical spirituality, or perhaps he's just as I said--a hardass. I'm eager to understand more about him and I'm confident that I'll acheive this gradually over the next 2.5 months aboard Gitana. A real character.

So with my first post I left a quote from Aleksander Solzhenitsyn. Here it is again:

"Long periods of well-being and comfort are in general dangerous to all. After such prolonged periods, weak souls become incapable of weathering any kind of trial. They are afraid of it. Yet it is a fact that difficult trials and sufferings can facilitate the growth of the soul. I know there is a widespread feeling that if we highly value suffering this is masochism. On the contrary, it is a significant bravery when we respect suffering and understand what burdens it places on our soul. "

Solzhenitsyn wrote this as a prisoner in a Soviet labor camp run by the Gulags. I certainly do not presume to compare my experience to his, but I will say that spending four days straight on my hands and knees probably been the closest I've ever been to forced labor.

I posted the quote on Friday--the morning before I started scrubbing. In retrospect, I guess I have to eat my words.

Stay Tuned--Paul


"...Those who see sailing as an escape from reality have got their understanding of both sailing and reality completely backwards. Sailing is not an escape but a return to and a confrontation of a reality from which modern civilization is itself an escape. For centuries, man suffered from the reality of an earth that was too dark or too hot or too cold for his comfort, and to escape this he invented complex systems of lighting, heating and air conditioning. Sailing rejects these and returns to the old realities of dark and heat and cold. Modern civilization has found radio, TV, movies, nightclubs and a huge variety of mechanized entertainment to titillate our senses and help us escape from the apparent boredom of the earth and the sun and wind and stars. Sailing returns to these ancient realities."

Robert Pirsig, "Cruising Blues and Their Cure"
Esquire Magazine, May 1977