I woke up after I fell to a light sleep while reading Ruiz Zafón, a great tale teller of Barcelona. The previous day I took advantage of the early autumn morning to walk for a couple of hours through some of the streets mentioned in his novels. The departure of Palma night ferry had been about 6 hours ago and the almost imperceptible roll together with the monotonous vibration of the ship’s engines was producing in some of us a hypnotic effect increased by the absence of a defined horizon.

IhaddecidedatthelastmomenttomakethejumptoBarcelonabyferrytoattendameetingthat,although I preferred not to miss, did not deserve both the time and money expense of the trip by airplane.I came outofthatuncomfortabledozingoffbyhavingtoadoptpositionstowhichthebodyrefuses to get used to and the wearing of the clothes of the previous day when tiredness or night catches us on ferries, planes or long car trips.

The reality around me was a dense and quite suffocating gloom where dozens of bodies lay, mostly inert, in armchairs and in the corridors in almost macabre positions. Walking carefully, gaining little by little the balance affected by the recent awakening, the low light did not help the task of walking in a straight-line avoiding heads, feet and complete children in the fetal position. I went out to the port deck and without needing to adjust my gaze much I saw the lights.

They were amber in color and evenly distributed. The perspective indicated that the lights were fixed, so I ruled out that it could be a fleet of fishing boats: they were coastal lights. A white flash caught my attention towards the bow. Another, stronger, repeated itself persistently as part of a group of them. The human presence spoke to me in a language I understand, coming from a sea and a coast that we believe, innocently, to master. It is a visual language and has no voice or writing, the interpretation of landmarks at sea that associated them with symbols in the nautical chart. However, it is a language that is not forgotten once it has been learned and depended on it, and to which I am grateful for having revered and enjoyed its use in an era where observation, interpretation and calculation was done by the person in charge of navigation and not a satellite at 20,000 km high or a state-of-the-art radar with a repeater on the tablet.

In 40years, we have gone from being almost druids, virtually self-sufficient when we sailed, to relying almost obsessively on technology, on that false security that supplants experience and the sixth sense,fromknowinghowtointerpretalightoccasionallyunderthehorizontodependingontheautomaticadjustmentofanAIS.

Navigation, still much more art than science, has always been an arcane and not a mere number of formulas or geometry. Not only the feeling but the security of knowing where I was, the pleasure of having interpreted the message of the flashes, of recognizing that beacon that so often made me feel safe, generated a small shot of adrenaline that completed my awakening. I feel comfortable at sea, perhaps because knowing that I will never be able to master her, she allows me to fear and enjoy at the same time and always fully. I am a lucky member of her offspring, I will be until the last day. How captivating is this vastness! : not in vain the sea is for me a “she”.

By Oscar Siches