Programs Blog

Wednesday, 06 May, 2026.

Noon Position: (Lat and Long): 33 degrees 19.5’ N, 067 degrees 21.6’ W

Log (nm): 2337 nm

Weather / Wind / Sail Plan (from 1300 Watch Change): Clear skies, sailing under the stays’ls and mains’l on a starboard tack

Description of location: Bermuda Rise

My shirt is stained with all sorts of food from my stu stew day.  We made muffins and mashed potatoes and cabbage and bread and salad and chicken and all of it on a port tack. Shelby and Sally are two very diligent and kind stewards who make the time pass easily.

Things move fast and I blink. We’re here now, about a week out of arriving in Woods Hole. The days move as the sun does, not reliant on clocks and time runs fluid. The nights blend into each other and the boat and ocean decide my sleep. The weather as well, a cloud growing and disappearing, dropping its rain below, exhaling until the air is lost. Constellations curl over us and fall dim with the oncoming dawn.  All bodies, oceanic and celestial, are changing and we do our best to adapt our own with them.

            I often collect, writing things down as evidence for a sort of truth. Language usually fails in some sort though. This ocean is multiblued, always moving, always changing and nothing I write seems to do it justice. It evades containment, escaping my sense of language. Learning to accept the movement, the total and unknown fabric, is a constant.

            All experiences with the ocean are different and there are many, many multilayered blue histories to these waters. While language can fail, it can also ground and expand perspectives. I have come back to a few passages and poems often on this trip and would like to share them below. They offer language that provides context for other experiences and descriptions of the sea.

“We sail across spaces so vast they seem unending. Sun and moon rise and fall in turn, on the same thread of light and night…This is how we must love it, faithful and fleeting. I wed the sea.”

From The Sea Close By by Albert Camus (thank you Ciaran)

“Neither Man, nor Woman, I am water and shorebird. Over tea we ask hard questions. How to reach beyond this periphery. Reverse the enclosures of the mind. All bodies in theatre. All theatre, life.”

From Transgender Opera for Perpetual Metamorphosis by Heidi Antrea Restrepo Rhodes

“Water overflows with memory…queer relationships emerged in the holds of slave ships that crossed between West Africa and the Caribbean archipelago. I began to learn this Black Atlantic when I was studying relationships between women in Suriname and delved into the etymology of the word mati. This is the word Creole women use for their female lovers: figuratively mi mati is “my girl,” but literally it means mate, as in shipmate – she who survived the Middle Passage with me. Sedimented layers of experience lodge in this small word. During the Middle Passage, as colonial chronicles, oral tradition, and anthropological studies tell us, captive African women created erotic bonds with other women is sex-segregated holds, and captive African men created bonds with other men. In so doing, they resisted the commodification of their bought and sold bodies by feeling and feeling for their co-occupants on these ships.”

From Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic (Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage) by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley

 “I used to pretend to believe in God. Mainly, I liked so much to talk to someone in the dark. Think of how far a voice must have to travel to go beyond the universe. How powerful that voice must be to get there. Once in a small chapel Chimayo, New Mexico, I knelt in the dirt because I thought that’s what you were supposed to do. That was before I learned to harness that upward motion inside of me, before I nested my head in the blood of my body. There was a sign and it said, This earth is blessed. Do not play in it. But I swear I will play on this blessed earth until I die. I relied on a Miracle Fish, once, in New York City, to tell me my fortune. That was before I knew it was my body’s water that moved it, that the massive ocean inside me was what made the fish swim.”

From Miracle Fish by Ada Limon

“I remembered talking to my mom one night, weeks ago, about how being here in Chile somehow felt like I was everywhere and nowhere at all. About how I was just another person to make home in a new country, only to leave it all behind; I felt I had crafted my own magical world, a secret that would disappear if I did not share it. You will still remember it in 30 years, like I do, she had told me over the phone. And it will still be home.”

By Cigan Valentine

Many more stories, descriptions, and histories of water exist, please do share.

Etta Lund, C Watch

Clouds!

In the lab