When the day becomes a dream
It’s dark with no moonlight or stars (too cloudy) on my second nightshift of the night. It’s almost boring, there’s no wind and we barely move forward. The longer I stand outside, the more things I get to see. The bioluminescent krill, lighting up gently with every wave. And jellyfish popping up as big glowing lightbulbs aside and behind the boat. I take on my duties of not crashing in to anything. To my right I see some lights. With the binoculars I check it out. There is a red light – meaning port – they are moving towards the same direction. I keep checking them and see they are moving parallel with us. There are some lights behind me in the very far distance.
Stromboli. Behind some layers of mystery.
Suddenly, I see a big red light on my left. Too big to be a large ship... A lighthouse? The next 30 min. there is no light. Was it an illusion? Definitely not a lighthouse... Suddenly, I see the red light again, now brighter and larger than before. I grab the binoculars. Amazing! A spewing active volcano! The first of the Aeolian islands: Stromboli.
The light gradually comes in, the sea is silver and silky smooth. The lights on my far right appear to be from a beautiful antique 4 mast wooden ship. Martijns turn to take his shift. He pops his head through the ledge “Wow, am I dreaming?!”. “Happy birthday!”, I reply
When the day seems to turn into a daydream.
I slowly wake up to faint rocking of the matress I'm on. As my mind snaps back to a more awake state I quickly grab my shorts and t-shirt and walk up into the cockpit. Once outside I look out into a surreal looking world. "Happy birthday!", Jaclyn says when she gives me a soft kiss. We're sailing near our destination for this passage. This world is hard to describe. Everywhere you look the surroundings look fluffy and soft. The water is waving very slowly with long stretched strokes and the sun is shining from behind a thick damp mist reminiscing the morning.
Everything here has a blue-greyish toned glistering about it. Everywhere you look, it seems like a real-life photoshop filter has blurred everything into a fluffy greyish soup of light. A magnificent sight and as I become fully awake I consciously realise I'm not dreaming. Jaclyn tells me about the eruption of one volcano she saw earlier and the red glow that she saw afterwards in the sky. Then she disappears into the darkness of the saloon to go back to bed.
I realise it is my shift now. I quickly make some coffee and settle down behind the steering wheel. As I look into the dark room below I see Filise doesn't sleep in her bed tonight but chose the bunk in the living-room. Her smile, from her left ear all the way to her right ear, doesn't hide her feelings. It reminded me that she saw a large pod of dolphins from the bow of the ship swim along with us for hours.
I suddenly hear a sharp flushing sound and feel a drop of water on my left cheek. It seems the dolphins still swim alongside.
I stand up and give the weird surroundings a second look. Everything I can distinguish seems to be behind something else. There's fog, there are rays of light, there's shading, there is a faint glow everywhere that is constantly interrupted by small bright lightflashes. The only thing with clear contrast is the horizontal separation between water ans sky, wherever you look. Althought both, the sky and the sea, have exactly the same blue-greyish color, there's something about the glittering or the light-angle that makes a distinct contrast between the two parts of this mind-boggling view. The rest of what's visible is covered with this previously undiscovered photoshop-filter finish.
The volcanoes, the dolphins that jump out of the water in the distance, a gorgeous old-fashioned sailing vessel, slowly crawling along the horizon. Everything seems to be unable to escape the fading effect as if everything is experienced from inside a prism.
As I look around a bit more, utterly amazed by the whole experience and feel a second drip of water that runs down my face. I tell myself it was the wind that did it and quickly check the stats on the display above the navigation table. Everything is fine. I shake my head and return to the duties at hand. I press a button twice to readjust the course a bit and talk silently to myself: "this is going to be a very good day, or dream".
It seems no picture or words work well this time.