Programs Blog

Tuesday, 05 May, 2026.

Noon Position: (Lat and Long): 33 degrees N, 064 degrees W

Log (nm): 2189 nm

Weather / Wind / Sail Plan (from 1300 Watch Change): Sailing in perfect weather under the four lowers and the tops’l

Description of location: Bermuda Rise

Here are some more of the striking and beautiful things I have seen at sea! I think that the mysterious ocean generally escapes and defies description, and certainly my attempts at describing it. But I am still enchanted by its images and caprices beneath the skies, and I hope to convey some of them to you.

            The waves are like the movement of a diaphragm breathing up and down in the open air. They roll on and on in long, slow, rhythmic beats, rising and swelling as if they are holding their breath, tilting up in wide sheets of water to hold their faces to the sky, as if to touch it at last. Leaping up, the waves gasp and swallow lungfuls of air, but before they can reach the sky, they overbalance and rend themselves asunder in hissing exhalations and seething white foam.

            On hot afternoons, the waters are dark like polished obsidian, shining and smooth, stirring heavily as if trapped beneath the languorous golden light melting from the sky. Fleeting fragments of sunlight shimmer across the sea’s surface, taking shape and scattering like a murmuration of birds in flight.

            For days the sea has drunk the endless light pouring from the clear sky, and now it lies silvery and still beneath the evening. The water burns dark and lusterless beneath heavy, low clouds which bloom overhead in shapes like the undersides of breaking waves. In the still-pale sky, a soft, luminous blue shows through the open spaces in the clouds, and beneath it, the sea seems impossibly black. Invisible waves travel towards the ship and dive slowly beneath it, patiently raising it into the air and resting it again on the oncoming waters. Directly beneath me, unobscured for a moment by reflections of the sky, the cavernous mouth of the ocean gapes, and all the world seems engulfed inside this dark reflection of the starless night sky above. The ship tips blindly down the back of another wave and is saved from plunging into the open darkness only by the white wings of water which create themselves and unfold beneath the ship’s bows to fall and shatter against the obsidian waves like panes of glass.

            Other nights, the moonlight lifts the night sky up into itself, away from the velvet sea, so that despite the close soft clouds, the whole sky seems to expand, to inhale and open above me. The ship sails beneath the dome of the sky, as if through an enormous echoing cathedral hung with stars. A river of pale water opens beneath the full moon, and the waves look as if they have hollowed themselves out to hold this shining light. The black silken waters do not break as the ship passes, but merely rustle against each other, as if conscious of spilling the moonlight they carry across the sea. This open night is still and silent and I watch the movement of the ocean almost with a feeling of sacrilege, as if I am watching the beating of a bared heart.

            In the daylight, though, the indigo waves travel unendingly from the edge of the horizon, the ocean and the sky opening vertiginously below and above them. They reach and rock our ship and travel endlessly away again to the other edge of the sea. One day, these waves, which have stretched and gaped across the world itself, which have suspended themselves above the ocean’s abyss, may meet the edge of a continent, and, suddenly shallow, dash themselves open against a cliff side or upon a beach—these waves which have lapped at the rising moon and drunk the stars’ light and soaked themselves in sunshine will pour out the depths of the ocean in faint wrack lines and fountains of spray.

Ciaran Gavaghan, A watch

Cresting wave!

The end of a sunset