Monday 25 November 2019
Atlantic Ocean
position 15 ° 39 ′ N 037 ° 11 ′ west
21.20 local time, 23.20 UTC
miles traveled from Mindelo: 702
Missing in S. Lucia: 1377
With Nello, or the spinnaker, we are with white sails on a night of the beginning of the new moon. Today a day of pure sailing; we feel the pressure of the “pretenders” who follow us and encourage us to run fast. So what better day to debut Ariel’s new spi? Here is Spi-Nello, red and white, majestic and nervous, and welcomes all the possible wind and makes us run up to 10 knots. The afternoon passes quickly and the colors soon turn from yellow to pink and indigo. It’s time to put it to rest, while the wind picks up and calls for white sails for the night, pitch black, but illuminated by millions of stars.
I leave the pen to Maurizio, the Maurinaio.
“I take turns on guard, but in reality I am the thief: at most, I could say that I take turns as a post.
We are thieves, we here. Little thieves to rob the ocean, just to get by: some water to desalinate; a fish to eat; sun and wind to give us energy, bread on board, a hot shower.
On closer inspection, we are also a bit usurpers of the wind that creeps the skin of the waves we make them swell with sails.
And even a little insolent, we who insist on tracing a trail on him that he undertakes to mend and erase undeterred and relentlessly.
You could also give us cheeky voyeurs, yes, curious as we are to scrutinize the solitude in which he lives, full of himself, majestically superior and distant.
Disrespectful? And so be it: day after day we smear it throwing in its wind memories of discontent, sacks of hatred, scraps of frenzy that we brought in from the lands we come from, homelands gradually more and more distant.
And you already know that, floating heirs of Archimedes, we rest without restraint with all our weight on its soft water, puffed up by a principle with which every wave challenges it, minutia of sailors, not to swallow us.
In short, we are not flour to make hosts, we on board. Yet he embraces us, even rude and pedantic, voyeurs, disrespectful, and does not stop doing it.
This is why we are here, now, to ride sunsets that piss off for another too short day that ends; amidst myriads of stars that spy, in silence with us; in the chase of dawns that rise in the clean light: why do we feel like this, sea rogues welcomed, marauders forgiven in a boundless embrace of the ocean, and happy.
by Maurizio Miele
we enter the dark lulled by the Gipsy King
see you tomorrow
Ariel Team
