Musings from the back of the boat with my legs dangling in the surf created by the boat speed, wondering of there are any sharks around!

It’s the vastness and depth of this ocean that gets you.

I’ve crossed it countless times but never so ‘close up and personal’. Hour after hour, day after day of incessant motion. Forget about the boat or Clipper, focus on the raw power. Nothing but sea all around you, no land hazy in the distance, no otherboats, just Atlantic rollers, bigger than the boat, lifting you up and this time at least gently placing you down again. These are the trade winds, easy and benign.

The sea keeps relentlessly moving, the boat keeps moving, you can’t switch off even for a moment. Dolphins join us from time to time, racing and diving right next to the boat for the sheer joy of it. Flying fish hit the deck with an eerie thud, a remarkable example of evolution as they ‘hover’ over the sea.

At night, when the moon is out, it’s magical, phosphorescence streams off the back of the boat and last night shoals of luminescent squid like marine paparazza flash lime green.

You can’t help but turn your thoughts to the enormity and power of nature, God, mother earth or whatever your household Gods are, the sheer raw power of it.

Pointless wonderings are sparked, how many people on our planet? 6 Billion? …8 billion?? and if they were all in the North Atlantic how much space would there be between them? Say… 3 sq metres each and there’s 3,900 metres below them. 80 % of this planet is water. So how come we are steadily destroying it? Of course whatever we do we can’t; all we can do is make it uninhabitable for human beings. We can’t shatter it, just make it unusable and then over millennia nature will take on the long task of repairing it.

So you look at the stars, 1000’s more than you’ve ever seen, so bright in the Northern sky, where the Milky Way is so clear and you know that this planet is just one rock on a spiral arm of our galaxy which in itself is just one galaxy in millions in our known universe… it’s overwhelming.

Meanwhile back on earth we are just grains of sand in our own ‘galaxy’, with all our ridiculous hopes, dreams and fears. In the scheme of it just grains of sand on our amazing planet which in itself is a grain of sand in our galaxy and universe and that’s the beauty of it…