What was it like when you saw land?
The short answer…
None of us were looking.
The longer answer…
Did you know that when you row a rowboat, you never actually see where you are going? Yep, it always feels like you are going backwards and you are only looking back at where you’ve been and what is pushing you forward or at times, what is pulling you back to where you’ve come from.
We averaged 2 knots per hour (yes, that is 2 nautical miles an hour) for the first 2 weeks of our crossing.
To put that pace into perspective…
I often hike up mountains 3 mph.
I swam 2.4 miles at my first Ironman in 66 minutes. It was a calm lake in Wisconsin.
At times, it felt like we were never going to get to Hawaii.
To a person who is addicted to productivity, mentally, this was the toughest part of our journey.
Slow progress is still progress.
Don’t you hate when someone says that to you?
This is when we started to talk to the ocean.
Well, my teammates did first. I would be waking up from my sleep shift and I would hear Libby and DJ on deck saying things like, “Lady ocean, we see you. We appreciate you. We know you are in control."
I would smile. Inside, I was thinking, “come on lady ocean… could you help us out a bit and give us a damn current!”
This is where letting go of control became a practice.
Our mission statement for our journey was to elevate each others greatness and make it to Hawaii as fast as possible.
To quote Alanis Morisette, “isn’t that ironic?”
We could only go as fast as the environment would allow and we were going to see land when it was ready for us to see it. And when we did, it wasn’t this dramatic moment of it beautifully revealing itself. It sounded more like this,
“is that land or is that a cloud?”
And then a lot of laughter because it didn’t matter, we still had a long way to go once land appeared. It wasn’t until we could see lights on Maui that I personally felt the presence of other humanity entering into our 29 x 5 foot boat world.
Land itself wasn’t remarkable. It was what land represented to me. For 100% of our training, we didn’t want to be near land. Land was the thing that caused the weather to be more volatile and for us not to be able to easily get out on the ocean. Now, it was seen newly. As a journey that was coming full circle for us four women that spent more time on land getting to know each other than on a boat. For the effort of the last 11 months coming to a close and the uncertainty, wonder and excitement of what was next.
None of us knew where we would be sleeping that night and I didn’t know what I was going to get to eat. While I knew the conditions were going to be more luxurious than where we’ve spent the last 5 weeks, the planner in me was agitated that I didn’t get to choose. The routine from the last 34 + days was about to end and land and humanity represented boundaries.
We weren’t going any further in this row boat and as we were about to realize, we weren’t going to get full permission to do with our time what we wanted back on land.
