After the passengers were gone, I stayed on board for the long journey home to Honolulu. I got on board with them at Christmas Island, sleeping on the deck with them between Christmas, Fanning and Washington islands.
Line Islanders get double use out of the Kwai, turning the cargo ship into a ferry to get from place to place. The Kwai is a sailing cargo ship that travels thousands of miles through the Pacific Ocean every year to bring much needed supplies to the people who live in this far flung part of the world. One group of Kiribati islands, called the Line Islands, lie barely north of the equator and due south of Hawai’i, and that’s where I met up with the SV Kwai. The nation of Kiribati is a comprised almost entirely of water, with small pieces of land barely an interruption to the powerful wash of the equatorial currents and the trade winds that blow through them. Outer Voices is honored to present to you Blue Water Cowboys – three radio pieces presented against a backdrop of the images, words and sounds of the lives of a tight knit family of sailors who we’ve been lucky enough to know, and to sail with. These women and men inspire us, push us beyond our edge into adventure, and also help us get to where we want to go. Incredibly, in this day and age of instant connectivity of all kinds, there is still a way to fall off the edge of the human world, and that’s the provenance of the Blue Water Cowboys. The ratio of lives lost at sea to the quantity of poetry and music composed by the people who live there is impossible to calculate. It’s not an easy life but it’s a deeply rich one. “Blue Water” sailing is the kind where there’s no land to be seen, hopefully for days or weeks on end.
There’s a rare group of people who spend as much time as possible there, contriving their work, their relationships, and everything else in their lives to make it possible to be at sea for as long as possible. Sailing is tough business – one of the last frontiers of human experience in the natural world, in one of the last remaining wild parts of the planet–the ocean.
0 kommentar(er)
