The end of the tour

By Chris, climber/deckhand. 20 April. As I write this we are sailing from the Netherlands to Great Yarmouth, UK. The air is cool and the sea calm. The Warrior, our home in the sea, sways gently under the burden of her sails. About two hours ago I helped Sarah and Christina to rig the mizzen sail, and since then we've been making about six or so knots toward the east coast of the UK, and to the end of the tour for me.

And it feels like an end. The experiences of living and working aboard the Warrior and her crew are tangled up with me. It will take a while before I can clear enough space around me to see the end of this tour as the next begining. It's too much to be able to walk away from cleanly, and I'm not sure I would want to if I could.

The highlights? The lows? It's kind of hard to split it up that way. I can't imagine any of it having not happened, and it is what it is - a
package. A whole.

The sheer variety of experience has been overwhelming. Even in these, the last days of the tour, the richness of my life here, the
contrasting experiences, the diversity of environments I've found
myself in have had my eyes wide and childlike. Sliding fast over a
flat grey sea, nothing on any horizon, the wind in my face, and
time stood still and waited for us to catch up. Short moments later
and I'm falling asleep in a clearing in the crisp Dutch spring woodland, the songs of birds loud in my ears. Was that a dream?
No. It was yesterday (I think), Thursday. The world around me has
been changing so fast that I can't recall where the transitions were
between one thing and the next, cut and edited like a film.

Even the times when time slowed to a trickle I now look back upon
with reverance. Like the seven day transit from Gibraltar to the
Netherlands, the Warrior bucking and kicking like she's trying to
break free of the sea, hump-backed grey soldiers marching line
upon line past the mess portholes. And the end of it all - touching
land for the first time and feeling it sway beneath my feet. I would
not, and I don't say this lightly, have missed a single minute.

So what do I feel now as I start saying goodbye to it all? I'm not
sure I know. Ask me in a month or so. I have only just begun the
process of making sense of my experiences enough to file them
away in my head where I will be able to find them later. Right now
my mind, and my feelings about the tour in particular, are like a
room thats needs sorting out. Old things to discard and new ones
to move from place to place until they find their homes. So it's
going to be vague. It's like the horizon yesterday on our trip to the
island - I know it's there but I can't quite put my finger on it, like
something that you can only see out of the corner of your eye.
Here's my best shot...

Crazy. It's been crazy.

I'll let you know when I've got it down a bit better than that.

I hope we did good.

Chris

- climber and deckhand (when I'm not slacking) aboard the SV
Rainbow Warrior II)

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