Ophelia Offshore

I know, I know – you’re here to hear about the Pacific crossing. But these things take time! I’ve got six pages drafted up covering part of the journey, and as soon as I start toying with the idea of publishing it, I realize it’s missing critical pieces – I’ve left out one of my favorite parts – the emotional weight is all wrong. So you must continue waiting, as I unpack that incredible journey, both for the blog and for myself.

However, in the interim, let me point you in the direction of The Heniges Log Blog, my brother and his wife’s most excellent blog that covered our Pacific passage in near real time.

So, now that it’s clear this blog has taken up permanent residence in retrospective territory, let me share a little bit about the time we sailed our boat to mars.

When we landed on this foreign planet it was sunset and there was only one other boat in the anchorage, the water dead calm. No sooner than we dropped anchor, a panga approached and offered to dive for scallops for us. How many did we want? Four? The diver seemed disappointed in our order size, but before we could edit upwards he had taken off, diving into the water a few hundred yards from the boat. Fifteen minutes later he returned with four gigantic scallops. An abundance of sea life came off their shells in the galley as I moved as quickly as I could to separate scallop from shell. There were crabs, guppies, worms, little sea-horse looking guys – it was a mad scramble to wipe up all the sea life and get it back overboard before they got into the fridge crack.

Here is where I wish I could report on the impeccable preparation achieved and the juicy succulent scallops we devoured, but unfortunately I overcooked the shit out of them and we got to enjoy some rubber scallops. It can’t all be wins out here on the sea. In my defense, I barely cooked them! I will be practicing with some grocery store scallops as soon as I get a chance so as not to bungle this in the future.

The next morning we took a short walk to explore the other worldly formations, and the beauty of the bay made up for the texture of the scallops.