What's so mysterious about nighttime? Well, you can't see anything. You're sort of left to your own devices.
Night on land has its own mysteries, of course--mostly bumping into things on the way
to the bedroom, or walking on the bluffs and watching your own ability to see things
decline until it's almost gone and the world is shadows. Well, if night is mysterious on land it's
especially so on a sailboat at sea. It just seems like the entire world changes when the sun goes
down. There's a lot of research to show that people who are born with poor eyesight, or blind, develop
remarkable uses of the other senses. As one person said, you see with your eyes, I see with my ears.
But of course when night falls we don't change, even though it happens
every night. But I have noticed a marvelous temporary accommodation to the lack of visual
input. Mostly it's your ears. They seem to take over, everything is heightened. I have suffered,
if that's the word, many an aural hallucination. Oh I don't see people walking around the way Slocum
said he occasionally did, or Robert Manry, who was sick in bed on his transatlantic solo crossing and
was visited by a Scotsman who took over while he recovered. No, n0. none of that. It's the
sounds in the rigging, to me they sound like children laughing in a play yard.
I've heard the rigging calling my name, which must be some strange form of aloneness.
Night at sea is filled with sounds. Mostly they're the sounds of the water going by the hull,
because if you're lying down trying to sleep that's what you hear.
A yacht that's going six or seven knots creates a sluicing sound as the salt water rushes by the hull
only a few feet away. The rigging, as the wind crosses it, can make all sorts of sounds
and resonances of various harmonics. In a gale everything seems to hum, and any halyards,
if they're not rapping the mast, are singing a tune -- let me out of here! the halyards are saying
and in a gale you'd like to follow the halyards, if indeed they had a way
out of there. It's a symphony or maybe only a string quartet of common nautical sounds.
There's very little video evidence of what it's like to go sailing at night it just
seems obvious that if there's no light then there's no camera and if you put a
spotlight on a boat at night it just looks like a boat sailing along with a spotlight on it. And we
don't really sail in darkness, exactly. Down below there are red lamps which are supposed to preserve
night vision, but when you pop up into the cockpit, especially on a tropical night, even if there's no
moon--why the sky can be a shoal of stars. The Milky Way, which you can't even see in New York City--
"light pollution" they call that--but at sea there isn't any light pollution, and the running lights
are probably off if you're away from the shipping lanes, so when you look up there's a kind of highway
across the sky. It's just an absolutely remarkable occurrence, especially if you're hit moments later
in the face by a flying fish who mistook your boat for a wave and crashed right into you.
If on such a night you look forward you can see the reflection of the starlight alone on the waves
that you're proceeding through, and on such a night if you look aft under the right oceanic conditions
an extraordinary phosphorescent wake lays out behind you like another sort of highway--green,
sometimes extraordinarily colorful, jewel-like. But there's often a moon. Why, a full moon can
illuminate the whole ship. I once, many years ago, was able just for the stunt of it to read The
New York Times aloud in the cockpit to my crewmates. And I have laid in a bunk below
when I had to put up a curtain in order to stop the full moon from beaming right into my face.
Night is something that crews talk about long afterwards. I remember
when you went and set the spinnaker pole during that 30-knot gust.
Sure, all of that stuff is daytime stuff.
Say. remember that night we were sitting in the cockpit and and you told me that story you never
told anyone before? Well I never told you any such story! But...you did. I don't think there's anything
more intimate among men than standing a watch, especially the mid-watch from midnight until
four o'clock in the morning, with some guys you hardly knew. It's a time of expression.
Confession. Yes, the daytime is filled with towering cumulus clouds and rainbows and
rain squalls that come sweeping across and say hi! and then bye! The whole business of it is just obvious.
At night, all the externals are hidden and it's the internals that come out.
People wonder why I named my boat Thelonious, after Thelonious Monk. Well,
they say, you know, what's jazz got to do with sailing? Well, it's a good point during the daytime--
nowhere better pointed out than in a documentary which was shot in the Newport Jazz Festival in the 1950s
in which Monk's solo is interrupted with yachting footage.
After all, It's Newport, Rhode Island, at that time the great hub of sailboats, yachting, the America's Cup.
But the notion of interrupting jazz with pictures of sailboats, even marvelous sailboats,
even yawls, which you don't see anymore, is just bizarre. What were they thinking?
"Afternoon ladies and gentlemen this is Alan Young speaking to you live from the bridge of the United
States destroyer William R. Rush, located nine miles south south east of Brenton Reef Lightship
off Newport. The starting line is just a few hundred yards to windward of us here.
The uh third race is just about to get underway, the weather out here is sunny with a smoky haze on the
horizon, the wind is now blowing a lively 23 miles an hour, just a half an hour ago they clocked it at
18 miles an hour. It seems to be increasing all the time so it should be a terrific race today...."
Jazz doesn't really go with sailboats at all in that context, but I'm here to say that when the
sun goes down, when the interior of the cabin is rocking and rolling and the sounds of the boat
all around you are their own symphony, that if Thelonious Monk's music starts playing on the
stereo, especially as the ship's clock strikes midnight, then the alliance of the elegiac nature
of jazz music, of the ordinary profundity simply created by a predominance of major seventh chords,
really hits home. And nothing makes more sense, in the depiction of the ineffable experience
of sailing at night, nothing better describes it than jazz, which has those same attributes.
Night, jazz, sailboats. It's not all offshore, and can come very close to home.
A family cruise, an overnight with friends, a yacht club rendezvous with racers and kindred spirits,
children playing, couples dancing at the water's edge under that same moon.
It can be far away--some well-earned vacation from laptops and jobs--
to dine not clinging to a pitching table offshore, but dry and warm in some exotic land,
a sailor's indulgence in the freedom of time.
"Foxy's! Join the big party on Jost van Dyke, we've got reggae stuff--enjoy Foxy's
Caribbean barbecue and party the year away at Foxy's Outback and foxy's beach bars.
One small bar, one big party! Foxy's!" And then the journey back to anchor,
whether by splash of oars or drone of an outboard or the luxury of a ferry, the unfamiliar harbor
unfolds as if directed by Federico Fellini himself, the master of memory.
it may be that not everybody goes sailing at night, but that's a terrible, terrible mistake. On any boat
from a sunfish to a 30-foot cruiser, just say to your friends, let's shove off about six or seven
o'clock tonight, we'll have a little dinner on the boat and come back after the sun has set.
And it doesn't take very long for the shoreline to fade quite behind, so that you feel like you might
as well be in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Voices become hushed and perhaps a moment of
silence given to the burble of the wake behind and the rustle of the sails. And then turn around and
head home. As you approach the entrance to harbor it may look rather unfamiliar, but the chart and
the GPS show the navigation lights, and guided only by them, with almost no need for the long distance
vision that we take so granted in all of our other sailing, do you shortly enter the varying
avenues toward your home slip and quietly drop anchor there once again.
And I guarantee that once ashore the crew will stop and say, that was marvelous. Sailing at night,
I'm all for it. You can't see anything but you feel everything, and you remember it together.