PUMA Ocean Racing, on leg 5 of the Volvo Ocean Race, from Qingdao to Rio de Janeiro. Image copyright Rick Deppe/PUMA Ocean Racing/Volvo Ocean Race.
by Rick Deppe
A lot of people will probably start to wonder whether or not I've started losing it today and by the time I get finished with today’s blog I may well be!
In fact I'm doing fine, I hope. So apologies in advance for the madness that follows.
Today I set myself the challenge of describing, in words, what the ocean looks like! Why bother you might ask? Just take a picture; it’s good for a thousand words they say.......
To be honest I'm having the hardest time taking a photograph that I feel gives an accurate representation of what it looks like, or should I say doesn't look like. I got the idea from an essay I once had to write as a detention exercise in Middle School. It had the title ‘describe the inside of a ping-pong ball’, a traumatic experience at the time that has stuck with me.
The most noticeable thing today is the lack of a horizon. The sea and sky just sort of merge into one another, the sea has more texture and therefore colour than the sky but only because it’s moving. The colour that I see is a grey/green without any hint of blue which is surprising to me.
It's not that windy only about 14 to 16 knots so there are only the occasional whitecaps breaking up the otherwise monochromatic appearance. From where the horizon should be, the sky just goes straight up, one colour or no colour, without change, 180 degrees all the way across to the other non horizon. It's amazing the way it doesn't change at all. It's this ultra low contrast flat white of the clouds that reminded me of the ping-pong ball essay and compelled me to write.
We've been sailing along in this for at least two days now, and the moisture in the air is creeping into everything on the boat, nothing will dry. Hopefully we will break out of the cloud at some point soon and see some of those magical southern skies.
In that essay, all those years ago, if you’re interested, I imagined myself in miniature inside the ball, praying that no-one would decide to have a game.
Volvo Ocean Race
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