Palm Pleasure 2

Tuesday, May 19.

I didn’t make this voyage for the adventure alone. If I agreed to set off on another crossing, a second time, it was above all to spend time with my father. The sea is his native language. I grew up with it without ever really choosing it myself - born on an island, always with one foot on a boat thanks to him. I love it too, of course, but for him, it’s something else entirely. When he talks about sailing, the stars, the wind, and his thousand-and-one sailor stories, there is something different in his eyes.

Out here at sea, the days are simple, and I realize how lucky I am to be here with him, in his world, still learning. We are here, together. I don’t know if you would call it a passing down of knowledge - his way of looking at the water, reading the sky, understanding what surrounds us without ever really putting it into words. Today, he showed me how to plot our position on the chart, how we truly find our bearings, and revealed his very personal way of doing it: always at noon, just as sailors once did when navigating with a sextant, complete with a little sketch that is uniquely his own. My father also explained why we keep a logbook, what we record in it, and what purpose it serves. I remember that at the beginning of the crossing, he had asked each of us to write a little something every day - what we did, what we experienced, what we took away from the day. A way of leaving a trace. In the end, he was the only one who truly kept at it...