Programs Blog

Thursday, 30 April, 2026.

Noon Position: (Lat and Long): 32 degrees 22.5’ N, 064 degrees 40.8’ W

Log (nm): 1686 nm

Weather / Wind / Sail Plan (from 1300 Watch Change): Wind NWxW F4; clear skies; sailing south for a wee bit to avoid a frontal passage

Description of location: Bermuda Rise, North Atlantic Ocean

There is a song called Surabaya by Crayon Case, an indie shoegaze band from Indonesia. The music video is filmed home-video style and features a young woman, chic and pretty, walking around the city of Surabaya, Indonesia, staring pensively out the window of a bus with her Walkman plugged into her ears. It is sort of a manufactured nostalgia, because the video was uploaded circa 2025, and no one uses Sony Walkmans in 2025, but no matter. This song is the basis of this blog.

If you don’t know anything about me, you must at least know that I was born and raised in Singapore, making me the only Singaporean on board the Cramer. I also travelled across the world to go to school in the cornfields of rural Iowa, making me one of three Singaporeans at Grinnell College (not to be confused with Cornell University up in New York, or the similarly named Cornell College that is also somewhere in Iowa). Certainly, for such a worldly, metropolitan being as myself, I have seen many highs and lows and all the in-betweens in my travels. I have peed into the latrine of a stranger’s house off the side of a highway in Kenya. I’ve valiantly lost water fights in crocodile-infested lakes near the Ethiopian border. I’ve been scammed by thrift stores in Tokyo that claim to be American vintage but just sell Bass Pro Shop caps. I’ve been trapped in Paris for 30 hours. I’ve seen The Bean in Chicago but only through the grills of its renovation barriers, which really makes you wonder what exactly about a giant smooth metallic reflective bean-shaped sculpture needs renovating.

Unfortunately, I don’t speak Bahasa Indonesia, because I decided at the age of 12 I wanted to learn Japanese instead so I could haggle for rare anime loot on Mercari and read the Weekly Shonen Jump without having to wait for the translations. I have also never been to Surabaya. That has not stopped me from appreciating the musical genius of shoegaze in other foreign languages, and so as I was exploring the sights and sounds of Bermuda over the course of our four days there, the only thing that ran through my mind was the airy instrumentals of Crayon Case, and the soft, lilting vocals in Bahasa Indonesia, so gentle you’d miss it over the guitar if you weren’t paying attention, “Walking around the Old Quarter of Surabaya…”

Growing up in Singapore and Southeast Asia, visiting Bermuda was extremely uncanny for me, because of how similar and dissimilar it was to home. The elevation was weird – too hilly – the houses a tad bright and colourful, the people very decidedly looking and dressing very differently. It was too cold in the mornings, too rainy, for what I thought would be the tropics. Yet, I could’ve walked past places like Fort St. George’s and The Unfinished Church in cities like Malacca and Penang. In the unique and confusing accents of the Bermudans, American and British and Australian all at once, I saw the colloquial Singlish I grew up speaking, a mix of Mandarin dialect, Malay, Tamil, and 1950s British English. In the giant, garish pink ferries arriving in droves by Cramer’s dock, I saw the tourists that come in droves to the sandy beaches of Phuket, Bali, Langkawi, Pattaya, Bintan, giant sunhats and waist-bags in tow. Watching the mishmash of architectural styles and buildings fly by on my bus rides, flat, square-shaped candy-coloured residential compounds with deep green window grills, little shops operating from colonial-style shophouses way past their glory days, I felt like the girl from Surabaya, taking her bus ride past run-down European churches, mom-and-pop stores, children running, carrying schoolbags, cars whizzing by, seeing my home and not my home all at once. Suddenly I was nine and getting out of school, running to the mamak shop for biscuits, trying not to get Raspberry Swirl ice cream on my meticulously-ironed pinafore and canvas shoes, strolling home with my grandfather past our neighbourhood church – a grand historic monument that had been supposedly used as a visual marker by British air fighters during the war, frangipani, sunflowers, and overgrown grasses lining the pavements and swaying in the wind, the roar of buses rushing by us on the road.

The general consensus amongst the people onboard the Corwith Cramer is that Bermuda is awesome and Bermudan people are awesome, and I share that sentiment. There are people out there in this world who want to hurt you and wish you the absolute worst, but it seems that a significant number of people in Bermuda – not just local Bermudans – are not this way. People greet the entire bus when they board it, say hello to you on the street if you just so much as glance at them, and are happy to take their time answering any questions you have about Bermuda, which is very helpful for people like me who cannot be bothered to figure out international data roaming.

This is how I got to meet Nicky and Jill on the first day. Nicky, a local Bermudan, and Jill, a British lady who moved to Bermuda, work at gift shops in St. George’s, where we docked. Who needs Google when you have Nicky and Jill? I never even needed to say anything, they told me upfront all the places I had to go visit while I was here, when their opening hours were, and how to get there. Jill asked me what boat I had arrived on and dutifully wrote down “Corwith Cramer” into a notebook by the shop counter. I purchased a great many postcards from Jill, and was immediately notified of the post office’s opening hours, where you could buy stamps in St. George’s, and exactly which stamp to get if you wanted to mail international, so you wouldn’t get coerced by shifty characters into paying anything more than what you needed. Nicky told me that she had had a big hand in establishing this large café just down the street from her gift shop, and that I should visit at some point. I filed this into the back of my mental cabinet. A coffee and pastry never harmed anyone.

A while later I was loitering around in a back alley by the dock as one does when a dog and its accompanying tennis ball came flying at me, and then a young woman came flying out as well to retrieve the dog. That is how I met Milena and Manuel on my first day in Bermuda. They were two sailors from making a courageous voyage from Colombia, through Panama and Bermuda across the Atlantic Ocean, to the Azores and then Gibraltar. Manuel is from Chile, and Milena is an ex-veterinarian-assistant-turned-juggler from Colombia. Manuel, who only speaks Spanish (which made for a fantastic time, because I only understood “hola” and “salut” and “Singapore”), was busy repairing a shop window which he broke (???). Milena was just kind of hanging around playing with the dog, so we got to talking – about the weather, about how we, from complete opposite ends of the world, somehow ended up standing outside the same shop with the broken window in Bermuda, and about whether I would be interested in accompanying the two of them to a store to buy some snacks instead of getting real dinner, because food in Bermuda is extremely expensive and most local Bermudans cannot even afford to regularly eat out (according to Jill). I was hungry but of course I said yes. I was ready to subsist on Cheetos any day if I could keep talking to Milena and Manuel, these fascinating people who managed to convince what seemed to be a very mysterious captain into letting them onto his ship with zero sailing experience, sailing from South America all the way to Europe – all just for fun! We took shelter from the heavy downpour outside the post office, where we proceeded to have an absolutely riveting conversation about all sorts of things, from the morality of scientific pursuit to the meaning of life and how to find happiness. Milena and I agreed that there was no meaning in life, regardless of whether you were rich or poor, dumb or smart, pretty or ugly, if you have never felt freedom. I learnt that Milena quit her vet assistant job years ago because she hated that she was earning her livelihood by treating animals that had been bred into lives of suffering solely for the entertainment and company of rich people. She had large ear piercings and her mullet was matted by the rain. She told me that she found it funny that I said my ship was sailing for scientific research, for the purposes of protecting marine life, but that we kill the animals we bring up in our nets and preserve them in painful chemicals, and I told her of the tiny fish we catch in our nets, their scales dancing in glittery rainbow colours under the microscope, pink, silver, purple, seaweed green, and how beautiful that sight is, and how important it was to many people on our ship and beyond that we understood as much as we could about these animals to protect them and their habitats. Manuel and Milena gave me hugs and kisses on the cheek when we separated to go back to our respective ships, and we made plans to see each other again. Milena said she wanted to teach me how to juggle.

On the second day, I almost got mauled by a house dog and trespassed into people’s homes (SEA does not endorse such behavior, I was desperate). Such is the life of a directionally challenged person who refuses to figure out T-M*bile international data roaming. That is how I next met Adnana, a middle-aged woman with a sharp smile and a really strong Italian accent, who lives in a great big house at the tip of St. George’s, pale yellow, visible from the hills if you drive towards the airport via the main road. Yes, I missed my bus stop so badly I found that I had gotten myself to the Bermudan airport on foot, which is many, many kilometres in the opposite direction from the docks. It turns out that walking straight for 45 minutes doesn’t resolve the problem that you are lost and only exacerbates it because you will simply walk until the road runs out and there are only chickens left and you start freaking out because you have 20 minutes to figure out how to walk 45 minutes to get back to Cramer for lunch. So, you can see why I was taking my chances barging into any homes that look remotely lived-in, which is how I almost got my face bitten off by a Dalmatian, but that is also how I was able to intercept Adnana as she was headed out to her car! Adnana lived in the house next to the growling Dalmatian, a giant cream yellow mansion with a big, open gate. I really only just wanted directions or even a sliver of information as to where the heck I was on this island, but Adnana said that Bermuda was perfectly safe and to let her drive me to the docks herself, so I hopped in and was indeed safely delivered – past a very confused Everett – right up to the shipyard gate. In that short ten-minute drive, Adnana told me that she had moved to Bermuda with her husband from Italy 15 years ago, and they now work in sales, hospitality, and events. I told her I was from Singapore, and she exclaimed that it was the first country she visited outside Italy so many years ago, when she used to work with cruise ships. What a small world! When I got out of her car, she called me some Italian words of affection that seemed to mean things like “beautiful girl” or maybe “my love,” so I told her thank you very much for the ride and I really hope to see you again. So much for stranger danger! Whahahaha! (SEA really does not endorse this behaviour.)

In the afternoon, I was at the drugstore buying stamps for my postcards when a kindly old lady with white hair walked up to me and cried, “You’re the one from Singapore, aren’t you!” It turned out to be Jill! It’s also dawning upon me that I may be the only Singaporean on this entire island, if that’s how everyone is remembering me, which was very special to think about. I told her I loved the postcards and was in the process of trying to get them mailed. She collected her prescriptions and, as she was about to leave the store, wished me good luck for the rest of the voyage. The doors seemed to close in slow motion; as her back disappeared into the sunlight, I realised I would never see Jill again. Later, I was walking down to Tobacco Bay by my lonesome when a car pulled up, and a distinctive sharp smile came into view in the front mirror – it was Adnana, headed to the gym after work! She jokingly asked me if I just walked everywhere, to which I said indeed. The day before, Milena had said, there is no need to pay for a bus or a car as long as you have your feet, and she was right. Adnana told me she had just clocked out from the restaurant she works at, Achilles, and that she was working the next day as well, and I promised to drop by. And then I continued on. This time, to ensure I didn’t end up walking all the way to Hamilton or something, I wrote directions on my palm to Fort St. Catherine’s beach, provided kindly to me by Liam back on Cramer. This is where I barrelled right into a couple trying to take a selfie with the beautiful scenery of Tobacco Bay in the background.

I understand the pain of trying to take a selfie, because usually in selfies only you can look good or the scenery can look good but never both, so I offered to help this couple take a proper photo. It turns out that Chris and Karen were a married couple from Charlotte, North Carolina, and they were visiting Bermuda to celebrate their 40^th wedding anniversary. They were amazed at our sailing journey that I had described, and even more amazed when I told them I was not one of the Americans but from Singapore, and said, “But your English is so good!” Singaporeans are pretty good at English, after all. Has anyone told you that I am Singaporean? I realised that this lovely, easygoing couple must have come on one of those giant ferries. Some people look down upon these cruises with distaste, thinking that many of such tourists are dumb and rich and behave obnoxiously in foreign places. But as Chris and Karen offered to take photos of me in return, Karen planting herself in the middle of the road to get the best angles and shamelessly ignoring the motorcycles that had to swerve all around her, I could only think of my parents, who definitely do the same thing when we go to foreign places, and also of how the ferry, just like our tall ship, brings people together, and to places we would never have been able to step foot on otherwise. It is a vehicle to give people valuable memories – of time spent with loved ones, of fond and fun experiences, and of new encounters, encounters that would have been otherwise separated by geographical limitations. I only wished the best for the people who wished me the best with bright smiles on their faces in turn. I imagined the bright pink ferry with its loud blasting horn departing Bermuda and magically depositing Chris and Karen back into a suburban home in Charlotte, North Carolina, with a front lawn and garage and maybe some trinkets hanging on the front door. I wanted them to have a 50^th and a 60^th wedding anniversary, and to continue being happy.

When I finally got to Tobacco Bay after such an eventful afternoon, I stripped down to my swimming costume, and sat quietly in the waves, getting pushed around like a ragdoll in all directions for about 45 minutes. It started raining heavily – curse the tropics! Seriously! I can say this because I’ve lived here for over 20 years! I moved to start packing up. But then the skies cleared up immediately, in true tropics fashion, and all of a sudden, a beautiful rainbow had stretched itself from one end of the sky to the other. That day, I returned to the Cramer 30 minutes late to dinner and had to do the walk of shame past all the professional crew sitting outdoors at the taproom by our ship.

You might be thinking by now that I am simply crazy. Whahahaha! I have been called that several times already on the Cramer and beyond, but we are just getting started. You can stop reading this blog if your eyes are tired. I am simply taking advantage of the lack of editorial restrictions on these blogs, in particular the page length. Me personally, you do not need to be crazy to find yourself in such situations, you just need to go and put yourself in such situations. That aside, you should not let me AND Ciaran anywhere foreign with no cell service on both our phones, because on the third day we ended up meeting the final boss of St. George’s Town Square encounters – the mysterious captain of Milena and Manuel’s ship himself, and taking a walk with him. Hernand is tall and lanky – a sturdy Argentinian man with greying hair under a paperboy cap, a man whose skin seemed to have been wholly weathered by traversing the seas, a serious and honest look in his dark eyes. In three minutes of meeting him I decided he was a solid man – even his clothes, aged and dulled by time and the salty elements, looked solid enough that they could stand up on their own. Hernand was looking for Milena, who had gone off with a local Bermudan to play pool at a club he had his private reservations about. The club was supposedly on the way to Tobacco Bay, which I wanted to visit, so I grabbed Ciaran, who was loitering around in the town square for some reason, and he wispily and gaily followed along in an instant. Safety in numbers. As we walked up the hill overlooking the docks, Hernand answered our questions succinctly, in a no-nonsense manner. We learnt that Hernand had been sailing for 50 years! He pointed out his ship to us, a small boat no longer than maybe 15 metres, but a boat that looked properly taken care of, with a unique deep blue sail and mast. Hernand was trying to get to Italy for another sailing job and had collected Manuel and Milena, along the way. He said that he had sailed to Singapore twice and had a lovely time there, and I realised that adult people like Adnana and Hernand, who tell me that they have been to Singapore several times, went all these years ago, and have thus seen a completely different Singapore than the one I grew up in. And I too must have seen a completely different Bermuda from them, these travellers and seafarers who come and go as they please and sometimes choose to stay. And I am seeing a completely different Bermuda from everyone else on the Cramer, who are all experiencing the island in their own ways.

            Anyway, Hernand got horrifically lost himself. With an emphatic expression of a choice curse word beginning with the letter ‘F’, he decided to send me and Ciaran on our merry way to Tobacco Bay before resuming his search for Milena and this suspicious pool club. With no further preamble, Hernand strolled away into the distance on his lonesome, and I never saw any of the trio again. Ciaran and I reached Tobacco Bay, where we took off our shoes and ran around and jumped and pranced barefoot. We saw poking out of the water the tails of brightly-coloured fish, fish that were so incredibly orange, and green, and cyan blue. When the tide rose, we crossed the road to the high-flying dinner spot Achilles, right opposite the Bay, to keep my promise with Adnana. I put my face into the glass door, and she emerged instantly, hair done nicely into what I imagine must be her signature high ponytail, welcoming me with a big hug and kiss on the cheek. Adnana took Ciaran and I past the dining area all the way to their private restaurant beach, because this is a first-class establishment, where we ended up spotting four Physalia washed up on shore, which was so wonderful and splendid! We went back into the restaurant where we realised we were so underdressed, two nerds wearing our grey SEA shirts and tracking sand all over the wooden floors, sitting amongst rich older couples in fancy polo tees and leather shoes and flowery sundresses and beaded slippers. The servers seemed extremely confused at what to do with us, but we were paying customers regardless and so were treated to extremely delicious sushi rolls and cotton caramel cheesecake, which we scraped clean off the plate, having been trained by weeks of Dish Respect on Cramer. We also accidentally spent $28 on sparkling water because Ciaran and I are apparently very susceptible to convincing marketing tactics.

After our lovely dinner watching the sun dip its golden ink into the water and a giant 47-storey Dreamliner steamroll across the entire horizon, Ciaran and I dragged our aching feet back to the dock and clambered into our own luxurious water taxi, which is just our really wet and flooded rescue boat diligently piloted by Tadhg. Hurtling over the choppy waters, Supi’s dive light flitting through the waves, we charted a course straight for Mama Cramer. As she came into our sights, the mains’l boom started towering over our dinghy, this boom that demands every single idle hand on the ship in its setting – because you’re not just hauling on the cloth of this massive sail to make it go up, but also the entire boom itself. Our little boat turned and rounded the bow. I held my breath as we passed her masts and her braces, her lines neatly running up and down tethered in all angles, ladders stretching to the top. The bowsprit, although perfectly still and unmoving, seemed in that moment to be sentient, gently saying hello to us. I felt a settling in my chest, the same feeling I get when the college airport shuttle bus turns left on the I-80, passing bright green tractors, age-worn farm sheds, and the sign “Welcome to Grinnell, the Jewel of the Prairie,” the same feeling when the plane lands on tarmac, the lights turn on, and the air stewardess’ voice crackles over the intercom, “And if you’re from Singapore, welcome home.”

I made out the silhouette of the headrig in the dark. Every time I see the headrig from outside the ship, I never get used to the realisation that the netting is so much smaller than how it feels standing on it, when you’ve gone out to wrestle a sail under the hot sun or do your lookout duties. You’re staring out at waters and skies that never end, an infinity whose colours are impossibly blue, more blue than you could ever imagine, but also steel grey and teal and seaweed and golden and pink and orange and lavender and midnight black all at once. This is an infinity so indescribable that people spend thousands and thousands of dollars to go out to see, to photograph, to write about, and to paint. In droves, they board ferries and large, steaming cruise ships blaring rainbow strobe lights that drown out all the stars in the night sky. Artists fill reams of papers and books with words, exhaust all their palettes of watercolours and acrylics, and purchase the most expensive lenses and cameras and protective gear in the hopes of capturing this view, this exact second, this exact moment. Scientists spend millions and millions of dollars to invent snazzy, sleek computers, contraptions and gadgets to toss out into the ocean in the hopes that the rigour and logical methods of science can sensibly quantify and describe, using numbers and charts and wavelengths and p-values, this absolute unit of infinity that we are looking at. Politicians, advocates and activists go to town on each other and spend their entire lives and careers trying to place a dollar sign and/or moral valuation on this infinity.

Jill, Nicky, Milena, Manuel, Adnana, Chris, Karen, and Hernand, over the course of these four days, they tell me, in varying orders, I loved talking to you, good luck on your journey, and all the best with your life. To certain effects, they tell me that we young college students are doing amazing things adventuring out into this vast open ocean, and there are only more amazing things to come in our lives. With some sort of finality, they turn back and smile at me and say see you later, but we know we will never see each other again. Back on the Cramer, Simon looks for me and tells me it’s time to wake up even when I really don’t want to, so I can eat real food and not stand watch on an empty stomach. Gray tells me to stand still as they zip up my life jacket before we board the rescue boat. Aiden and the marine techs tell me to come and sit under the microscope with the Myctophid Bible to ID our fish catch, even when they can do it faster themselves. Jakob tells me how his probably-super-expensive Ghostbusters backpack-computer-sensor-gun works and trusts me to carry it to help collect data for his project. Ciaran tells me that he doesn’t mind accompanying me on ridiculous 17-kilometre-long walks through the middle of nowhere, so that I don’t feel lonely. Captain Allison tells me which clouds in the sky look like a bird, or the rough callouses of rhinoceros skin, or a stingray, or a moray eel with its jaws wide open. Oskar tells me that the most important thing you need to take a good photo is not technical prowess or expensive gear, but your heart.

Today is my StuStew day, which is why I have time to ramble on this blog, and I ended up being even more sleep-deprived than before we arrived in Bermuda, so I think I have actually maybe finally gone mad, and this is quite evident based on my writing. Anyway, after helping Sally make cookie batter for Keya’s birthday (Happy Birthday Keya!), I came up to hear that we were setting the mains’l so we could finally go sailing again, and they needed all the hands they could get on the halyard. As I joined the back of the line, the islands of Bermuda were floating ever so distantly away from us, little dots of white and pastel pinks, greens and blues, like taffy candy scattered amidst lush deep hills. One might still perhaps able to imagine the faint, tinny music carrying over from the speakers at St George’s town square, the roar of motorcycle engines reverberating through the main streets, the sounds of shouts, laughter, and greetings. In our hands, however, was a rope that just seemed to pull us further away from these shores the harder that we hauled on it. I had blisters on my palms, bruises all over my shins, sand in my sandals that just wouldn’t wash out. My hair, once a bright neon pink and purple, felt dulled and fried and itchy from sea spray. Behind me, up at the bow, was a limitless expanse of bright blue – the same blue of the scotch tape we use to stick our papers to the walls and to put labels on our petri dishes. The faint smell of chocolate chips baking down in the galley wafted through the air.

At the end of Surabaya, the vocalist sings this one line over and over again, as the layers of guitar and drums begin fading out. She says in Bahasa, “di mani hari… di mani hari… di mani hari…” To be quite frank I don’t remember what that phrase means or if I even spelled it correctly, but I think it’s something to the effect of “one more day,” or “another day,” or maybe even “yesterday.” The days go by fast here, on Cramer and in Bermuda. But there will always be more days and once you realise that you are free to do whatever you want with them. And if there are no more days left then you can look back and realise that you did your best to have very happy and very good days indeed.

I don’t have a Walkman but I have my friends who sing Irish folk tunes and sea shanties from the top of the charthouse. I don’t have a bus window, but I have an infinity that stretches out from my railing, salty air that I can just touch with my fingertips if I reach out.  The old housing estates of Singapore, the old buildings of St. George’s. The Old Quarter of Surabaya, the quarterdeck of the Cramer.

There is nowhere else I want to be.

Natalie Ng, C Watch

Me (Photo by Chris and Karen)

Home from afar (Photo by Natalie Ng)