A breathtaking show for an audience of one
Issue 95 : Mar/Apr 2014
It’s just past 2 a.m. The only sound is the velvet swish of water sliding along the hull. We’re about 50 miles offshore with no sign of human habitation in sight — only Mother Ocean, glowing ethereal silver under the full moon, stars without number, my lonely soul, and the sailboat. The feeling of glorious isolation is existential.
I am perfect.
A large splash next to the boat is totally unexpected. It almost scares me out of my skin. Did something fall overboard? No, it’s a dolphin jumping beside the boat — one, two, an entire pod. I wasn’t expecting company tonight. Yet my isolation is unbroken, these creatures are alien — muscular slippery denizens of a deep I cannot know.
Even so, we share a living sea tonight for the water is alive with both the large and the small — the dolphins making their surprise appearance along with microscopic dinoflagellates burning yellow-green in the sea. The boat has been trailing a ribbon of faint green fire for hours, bioluminescent celebrations of the life force at a scale too small to see with the human eye. We have just sailed into an extremely bright patch, a glowing carpet on a black ocean. The pod of dolphins explodes the water with bioluminescence like it’s the Fourth of July. The scene is beyond words. Dolphins leap from the water, glowing apparitions I can scarcely believe. As they swim, they disturb the tiny light-emitting algae in the water and trigger luciferin, the chemical of magical backyard twinkling that is the firefly’s sexual fire. The algae-laden water coats the airborne dolphins with glowing sheets of neon fire. When they dive back into the water, living arrows of light, they trace paths — dolphin-shaped tunnels of bioluminescence. The glowing underwater tubes vanish as quickly as they appear, leaving me with an afterimage in my eyes and stunned with the intensity of raw beauty. It is a thousand sunsets at once.
My breath is gone, a bird flown from my chest.
Several young dolphins surf the bow wave of the sailboat. There are three on each side — a biological jet-fighter escort. The night is dark and the sea is black. My escorts leave glowing trails behind them, three lines of fire paralleling each side of the boat. It’s as if Poseidon himself assigned these creatures to protect me.
The large dolphin swimming beside the cockpit trails a 2-foot-diameter tunnel of light in the dark sea as elegantly as a beautiful woman wears an evening gown. He rolls a bit and makes eye contact with me for a long second. A friendly squeak and he dives deep. Coming up beside the boat like a phosphorescent missile, he does a mid-air half turn and splashes back with an explosion of green light that’s simply unbelievable. Then he comes back and makes eye contact again, as if to say, “What did you think of that?”
This dolphin is showing off.
It’s just past 2 a.m. I’m on a sailboat miles from land, the only other person aboard is sound asleep belowdecks, and I’m communicating with a different species. This is what cruising is all about.
After a time measured on a clock of maybe 10 minutes, but measured by my soul as perhaps forever, the pod angles away into the night, continuing whatever mysterious voyage they must be on. I watch as the streaks of light move across the star-speckled surface of the Gulf of Mexico.
I remember to breathe.
Butch Evans got his start sailing with a 15-foot West Wight Potter on the windy lakes of Kansas. A few years later, he was astounded to find himself cruising an Island Packet 38 in the Bahamas. Currently boatless, he lives nestled up against the Smoky Mountains where he hikes, bikes, writes, enjoys unlimited hot water, and schemes for the next boat.
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