No Tech On Deck

My phone has been in airplane mode for 26 days. It's practically useless, along with my computer, which spontaneously went black two days after departing Tahiti. On the open ocean, I quit silicon cold turkey. It feels amazing. A few days ago, I sat down and read a book cover-to-cover in a day for the first time in years. The same day, alongside friends, I processed a neuston tow, helped put a gorgeous furl on the jib, saw ten minke whales surrounding the boat, planked on the quarterdeck, hauled on dozens of lines to set, trim, and bring across sails, laughed uncontrollably. How many of these delightful moments would screens have stolen?

It's feels like time stands still. Swells are a constant frothing through the limitless bright, but their metronomic rise and fall becomes a constant.

Stepping off the ship, as I did today for the first time in over a week, it seems not a day will have passed for the rest of the world. The various pieces of information that I normally use as references: the news, my personal calendar, seeing friends, meeting people, daily routine are gone.

Physics says motion is relative. A moving object will appear at rest if the observer moves with equal velocity. Say time is a car, zipping along a ribbon of the space-time continuum. In my previous life as a land lubber, references aplenty shot past my window, proving the car's motion through their relative motion. But now the azure South Pacific occupies my entire window. The car forges onward, but from my seat, its relative velocity is zero.

There's a part of me that itches to reconnect with the rest of the world.
How is my family doing? Are my summer plans still intact? Who won the Stanley Cup for goodness sake? My whole life as a citizen of digital society, a wiggle of fingers revealed these answers. Sometimes, these well-programmed fingers still open my phone and head to email or internet browsing. Of course it's just blank screens. Habits are hard to break.

Do I want to access the internet? I had the opportunity to do so today in Nuku'alofa, Tonga. But overloaded WiFi made the decision for me; I had no bandwidth to check email, send texts, or read news. So until American Samoa, I am off the grid. I will relish my last days away from impersonal cyber-clamor. But I do look forward to eventually reconnecting with friends and family who I love dearly and have not heard from or spoken to for quite some time.

My experience at sea has been too special to go back unchanged. One of my main takeaways: the ocean reminded me how little I truly need a phone or computer. These are tools with beneficial uses no doubt, but I developed immunity to their ails until the ocean took my devices away. Now, I can live in the moment, every moment. Things will change when we leave the Robert C Seamans, but don't be surprised if there are days I leave my phone off and zipped up somewhere. Life is too short not to be present for it.

Being present for the past 26 days resulted in opportunities for reflection.
What does reflection look like? It is staring into the bioluminescence exploding in the bow wave for an hour, a fourth-of-June sparkler. It is writing more. It is spending endless hours with friends laughing and singing and of course, fitting in a core workout between every watch. Praying alone.
Hanging out with friends and thinking about only what is happening in that room. It is not being able to get over the way the light plays on the ocean surface. When the towering swells during our transit to Palmerston shook us violently, the ocean was like a shredded cloud, left jagged, torn open, grey. Then for the smooth passage to Tonga, it undulated in smooth puddles of violet, pale blue, and teal, a liquid kaleidoscope.

Reflection is a blessing. Without it, I chase time away and lose track of part of myself. At sea, less technology and more reflection increased my productivity and joy. I shall not forget this lesson back ashore.

-Nathan Marshall