Atlantic Crossing Part II Days 36 – 38: AwwwSASSIN

Friday July 25, 2014

In my boredom of my morning shifts alone I’ve taken to mimicking the cat, repeating every move she makes just to see her reaction. If she moves her head to the side, I move my head to the side. If she makes a large and exaggerated yawn, I make a large and exaggerated yawn. If she starts licking herself clean….well, I just rub my nose along my arm and pretend I’m doing it too.

Oh my, I might be starting to lose it. But people do that right? Mimic their cats? Even the ones that aren’t going mad from solitary confinement. Oh wait, most cat people are solitary. Nevermind.

Saturday July 26, 2014

Today to relieve my boredom I’ve taken to reading PDF’d posts from a few of my favorite bloggers, who coincidentally happen not to be sailors. Because God help me, please let me forget for just one moment that I’m on a boat. Losing myself in the travels and musing of The Everywhereist and Mr. & Mrs. Globetrot, I fantasized about all the places we’ll be visiting.  I spent a good hour today staring at Yuriy and Julia’s images of Turkey, making lists of areas I’d like to visit that they’d already seen, and most importantly, listing the all the food there I’d like to try.  Plus, just generally getting lost in the beauty of their amazing photos.  Oh Europe, we’ll reach you some day.  I’m sure of it.

Sunday July 27, 2014

In every other blog I’ve read about someone crossing an ocean, each one of them at some point has had a feathery friend take refuge on their boat, and for weeks now I’ve been wondering if it would ever happen to us. I mean, there’s only so many places one can rest out here, our boat has to look pretty appealing to anything flying along, right? But for days out of Bermuda we watched long tailed tropical birds swoop by, eyeing lifelines and solar panels, but never actually touching down on them. There’s even been a bird that we’ve seen come out and do laps around our boat for hours every night that we assumed had to be hiding on Serendipity during the day, but we could never find it’s spot.

Then this evening during dinner, we finally had a taker. A little song bird it looked like, but a far cry from all the sea birds that are normally flying overhead. It took up residence on the lifeline on the starboard stern quarter, and Matt held Georgie back as she noticed our new guest too. For a few minutes we all stared at this temporary visitor, wondering what it would do next. Was he just going to catch his breath and be off again or was he looking for a place to hunker down for the night? Trying to get a closer look I inched myself over to the starboard side while our new friend made no startled motions to get away. Maybe I could pull a Slapdash and get it to rest on top of my head?

I was so excited at the prospect of having a bird aboard to play with, that I was just about to turn to Matt and tell him about stories I’ve heard of birds like this that don’t know to be afraid of humans or pets because they’ve never encountered them before. I was just about to tell him about the cases of other cruisers that have set up birds, nestled in lines or small blankets, as extra travel companions for days. Before I could get any of this out though, he made a grave mistake and let Georgie out of his arms so she could investigate the situation.

His assumption, before I could correct him otherwise, is that if Georgie got too close this bird would sense the danger and fly off. But after having just read through Maiden Voyage a second time, I distinctly remembered a chapter where she found her cockpit a mess of feathers after her cat found it’s own flying companion. It wasn’t even a half a second before Georgie was on the other side of the boat, exactly where our new friend was sitting. Both of us looked off to the sky to see where the bird had gone, it took us a moment to realize that Georgie was already headed back to the companionway with the bird in her mouth!

While I grabbed on to her to keep her from going any further, Matt pried her mouth open to get the bird out. It was quite a feat though as she was not ready to let her prize go. When he finally wrangled her mouth open and the bird fell out, I rushed her down below deck so she couldn’t go at it a second time. Inspecting our injured friend we couldn’t find any wounds puncturing the skin, although we assumed there might be some internal damage. The bird wasn’t flapping around although it was still breathing, so at least we knew it wasn’t dead. Maybe suffering from shock though. Taking one of our 5 gallon buckets we made a tissue bed and set the bird inside to see if it will make it through the night. Georgie went back onto her (shortened) leash to make sure she couldn’t make any visits to the infirmary.

 Look at that face.  No remorse.