Blue water. The deepest seas. Where there’s no white sand below to make the water aquamarine, or sea grass to turn it green, no marsh mud and nutrients to make it murky brown. Blue water is the desert of the ocean: too far from land, and too deep, for sediment or nutrients. It is the abyssal liquid blue of sunlight piercing pure water, and refracting until it disappears into depths too deep for light to penetrate.
My husband wants to blue water sail. He wants to cross an ocean in a sailboat. Not me. All I can picture are walls of sea that our (comparatively) tiny boat would climb up and slide down, violent storms, utter isolation, and certain death by drowning with no chance of rescue if something were to happen to our boat.
I can see the draw of all that (except the drowning). I’d love to sail on the world’s largest liquid sapphire. Can you imagine the blue of that fathomless water? Or the depth of black of the sky at night, sprayed with stars?
But I’m not brave enough for the risks blue water sailing entails, the distance from land. No, I’d rather stick to the shallows, where the water turns turquoise over bleached coral sand, where palm fronds flutter on land I can see from the boat, where our longest passage is a day, and there’s an island at the end of it, with fresh fish to eat, music, and piña coladas. Where we can snorkel off the boat and see fan corals swaying under a gentle sea, so close we could reach out and touch them, rather than jumping in and looking into a bottomless blue abyss.
Butterfly Mind 