Dateline: Beneath the English Channel

That’s right: I’m currently underwater AND underground. I’m aboard the Eurostar, the high-speed train from London to Paris, after a couple of days in the UK. I had originally planned to head to Scotland after my days on Polar Bear, but it turned out that my sister-in-law and two eldest nieces were going to Paris, so I figured I’d join them there for a bit. Since I was always planning on heading to France while over here in Europe, this development simply sped up the process.

The two-plus days in London were interesting. It’s been — gulp — 35 years since I was last in the city, and that visit was for about 24 hours or so, as best as I can recall. I remember playing rounders, a precursor to baseball, in a park with a bunch of locals who were the children of a friend of my mother’s, and I remember being the cliché boorish American — even at 10 years of age. I was yelling and screaming and win-win-win and…ugh. I recoil to this day at the image of my behavior.

This time, I was slightly more subdued. The emphasis on this visit, however, like the last one was sports: I caught two English Premier League matches in two days, and was thoroughly entranced by both.

In the first, a sunny afternoon at Craven Cottage saw Fulham host Blackburn. Craven Cottage is pastoral site for a football match, with swans and rowers passing alongside on the Thames making the scene all the more scenic. The match played out to a 1-1 draw; not surprising since neither team is exactly setting the Premiership on fire at the start of this season.

One other point worth mentioning about the match: the moment of silence observed before the opening kickoff to mark the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 tourist attacks was without question the most sincere and deeply moving moment of silence I’ve ever experienced at a sporting event. Perhaps that was due to the fact that there was an American, Clint Dempsey, on the pitch, but whatever the reason, it moved me to tears. Indeed, the memory of the sincerity of the local fans in their gesture is getting me choked up now.

Last night, the 12th of September, I caught the Queens Park Rangers-versus-Newcastle United match at the former’s Loftus Road stadium. “Cozy” is putting it mildly: at Loftus Road I had neighbors’ elbows in both sides, knees in my back and head at my knees — and I had paid for good seats. And good seats they were: at midfield, about six such rows from the pitch, on which there was less than a meter to the touchline.

I’ve been a fan of the Premier League to varying degrees for a while now, but seeing the players this close made the game a whole new experience for me. Full disclosure: I was always a horrible soccer player. Truly awful. So I’m not trying to build the pros up because I fancy myself as being just a notch below them. But the fact remains: watching the skills of those players and the precision with which they played the game was hypnotic. The split-second timing and execution was magnificent — and we’re not talking about a lot of international-caliber players in this particular game. Color me way more impressed than I was before.

This match ended in a 0-0 draw, somewhat surprising since Newcastle is off to a great start this season and Queens Park featured five new signees playing their first match for the squad.

While both games ended up in kissing-your-sister outcomes, the experiences made the trip so worth the venture. The cozy parks where the games were played were like cleaned-up versions of the pitch where your kids play. Craven Cottage and Loftus Road are such intimate venues that they make Fenway Park seem like the new Dallas Cowboys Stadium.

Beyond the football, I cruised the underground (which is not, as Otto in “A Fish Called Wanda” believed, a terrorist organzation), drank Guinness on tap, wandered Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square and Covent Gardens and Trafalgar Square, and got the next stages of my European travels in order.

Which has led me here: racing across the French countryside at…how fast? Two hundred miles an hour? Whatever the speed, it was slightly unnerving as we stormed through southeastern England at that pace, the buildings and highways whirring by in a blur. Here in France, the farms and fields and villages — all with red, ceramic-roofed homes and a stone church with steeple — are more easily digested, visually, than the mayhem of urban and suburban England.

Which brings up another point I wanted to make: I rode a train into London on Sunday from Oxfordshire, northwest of London. I’d spent the night in a tiny little inn above a pub in a tiny little village out there in the English countryside. It was a wonderful place to stay and I felt oh-so-propah driving to the train station in the sun the next morning. All I needed was a tweed jacket, some leather driving gloves and a wool cap and I’d have made the very picture of a gent.

But what caught my attention was this: we were a brief, hour-long train ride from the heart of London, and yet this was full-on rural countryside. And that’s when it hit me: freeways are the scourge of the United States. If I’d been back in the U.S., that area would have been infested with subdivisions, strip malls and shopping centers, the farms and fields having long since been paved over. And why? Because we’d have built a couple of God-awful freeways enabling suburbia to sprawl out there, bedroom communities sprouting like mushrooms from a dung heap.

Instead, driving in the UK is a more genteel activity. Slower, to be sure, but less stressful than back home. Granted, it’s a much smaller country so taking your time still enables you to cover the length and breadth of the place fairly quickly. But lacking the sterile and utilitarian blacktop that we have in the U.S. has helped the UK retain its non-urban areas. I feel kinda sorry for us after having experienced what a viable rail system can do for a country.

Or countries, plural. This high-speed thing is awesome: comfortable, clean and without all the hassles of airports and snotty security people and indifferent airlines. I could get used to traveling like this.

And perhaps I shall. I’ll spend six days in Paris (where I rented a small house, a cheaper and better option than a hotel room) and then head on to Munich, where I’ve not been since I was playing hockey near there back, oh, 21 or 22 years ago. And I’ll be there for Oktoberfest, no less. Just a coincidence, I assure you. After that, we shall see.

But for now, my destination is the Gare du Nord in Paris in an hour-and-change, so to get in the spirit I’ve been enjoying a little vin rouge avec a croissant. Oh la la!

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Moonlight Sonata

Ahhhhhh!

I realize it’s 3am, but this is the kind of night you dream about — well, that I dream about — as a sailor.

I went topside at 11:30pm, half an hour before our midnight watch, to see what the weather was like, figure out which clothes I would need for the midnight watch, and find out why we were still on a starboard tack headed southeast. Emerging from the hatch, I was greeted by a cloudless sky filled with a myriad of stars and a daytime-bright, almost-full moon. Not a manmade light was in sight from horizon to horizon: no ships, no oil rigs, nothing. And to further improve the scene, seas were calm and the wind was a nice and steady 20-ish knots. Oh yeah…it was setting up for one of those perfect midnight watches.

For the first hour of our watch, we continued southeast with the nearly full moon to the south off our starboard beam. The white moonlight reflecting off the water was bright enough to read by (almost) and served as a shiny, shimmering axis, a rod used by a puppeteer to control a marionette to guide us along our track.

It was really too bright a moon for deep-sky stargazing, but away from city lights all the big-name constellations and sky patterns were readily visible. Lyra, Cygnus and Aquila and the summer triangle of their brightest stars Vega, Deneb and Altair were slowly setting in the west signaling the winding down of summer. Off our stern, the Big and Little Dippers pointed the way north and showed us from where we’d just come. Overhead, all of the players from the Perseus myth were present: Perseus himself, along with Andromeda, Cassiopeia and Pegasus. King of the gods and planets, Jupiter blazed brightly in the southeast while just a touch north, rising in the east, the Pleiades and Taurus the bull heralded the coming of autumn…and winter beyond.

Just before 1am, we tacked over for the straight-line run toward Newcastle. And though clouds started rolling in at that point, it was no matter: the continued spectacular sailing — seven-plus knots and right on the ideal track for our destination — and the joy of an hour of perfect, dark skies kept the high intact. Even the Finnish sourpuss exalted in the conditions, especially when Polar Bear hit eight knots while he was at the helm.

The spell finally broke a bit, not long before we finished our watch, as the loom of the lights of Newcastle and an antenna somewhere along the coast came into view. As if to counter the intrusion, Orion began his climb out of the sea back behind us to the east.

Whew. Sorry about that. Sorry to wax rhapsodic to the point of sounding like a greeting card or one of those posters teenagers put on their wall when they hit their I-wanna-be-taken-seriously phase, but it really was a perfect way to wind up the trip — that was likely our final watch as our ETA is 9:30-ish in the morning and we’re not on again until 10.

It was the kind of nighttime watch I love and never get enough of; the kind that makes me want to head right back to the States, buy my own boat and take off. Relax, Mom…not that that will actually happen: I don’t think I could get any boat ready to head to the Caribbean in time for a Nov. 1 departure, and after that it’s getting a little late in the season.

But a night like this (along with yesterday’s rollicking sleigh ride) goes a long way toward redeeming — or at least helping me overlook — some of the shortcomings that have occurred on this summer trip. Combine these couple of days with the sights and scenes of the Shetlands, the Lofoten, Iceland and Greenland, and some of the great people I’ve met along the way, and it really does make for a summer of adventure. Perhaps even the summer of my life.

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THE Sailing Day of the Trip

So, two days out from being over and done with this summer-long journey, we wind up having what may have been the best day sailing so far.

It started with the fresh breeze out of Lerwick, which persisted south of the Shetlands. And contrary to forecasts — not that they’ve been right once this summer — the winds persisted through the course of my 6-9pm watch.

We maintained an eight- to 10-knot speed for the three-hour run, and though the Finns were, let’s call them “directionally challenged” at the helm, we made a good, 25-plus-mile run. The sun went down in a blaze of pink cirrus clouds as the waxing gibbous moon rose in the southeast. And by the time we went off watch, we’d reached Duncansby Head, the northern tip of the mainland of Scotland. Even the Finns weren’t scowling as much as usual.

On top of that, we even had a fly-by by a tall ship. The three-masted behemoth, with sails flying from all the yardarms, appeared on the southwest horizon as an amorphous shape — an island where there wasn’t supposed to be one. As it grew bigger and began to take shape, we could see the brilliant white canvas driving the ship downwind to the northeast. And as she moved past our stern, the lowering sun brightened the fields of canvas into a mirage, an image from a bygone era: a lone tall sailing ship plying a foamy, spray-soaked sea beneath a cloud-streaked sky that spoke of rain to come.

The ship disappeared into the haze on the horizon, as anonymously as it had appeared. Norway’s tall ship headed home after a summer abroad? Seems a likely bet.

Our 3-6am watch that followed was, however, a tad anticlimatic as we came topside amid a field of North Sea oil platforms, ships servicing the platforms and a now-lessened wind that had us full-on motoring to the south. The lights from the plaforms were such that it felt like we’d gone to sleep in the middle of the wilderness and awakened in the middle of Times Square. On top of that, the flames spewing from the tops of the oil rigs recalled nothing more than the drive through the environs of Elizabeth, New Jersey.

Oh well. ‘Twas great while it lasted. In all, we covered about 176 miles in the 24 hours after leaving Lerwick. Now we’re still full-on motoring but the wind has swung through our bow and is now coming from the southeast and building. My watch team is about to go on duty at 2pm, a watch that will run through 4pm. I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to roll out the yankee headsail and maybe get our speed back up into the eights and nines (we’re in the mid-sevens right now), and maybe even get in a bit of steering. Yes, with the Finns at the wheel we’ll cover more ground than if we let the autopilot keep us on the straight and narrow. But if it placates them even a little bit, it’ll be worth it.

Two watches to go, in all likelihood: 2-6pm and then 12midnight-3am. We should be nearing the River Tyne around 10am, the time we’re supposed to be on next, which means everyone will be on deck and Boogie will be at the wheel. The countdown continues…

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