Stop Drifting, Start Rowing by Roz Savage

Author:Roz Savage
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Hay House
Published: 2013-09-16T21:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

WE CREATE OUR FUTURE

“Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an action and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.”

— RALPH WALDO EMERSON

I usually love to see wildlife at sea. Although in one way the ocean seascape is infinitely variable—every sunrise, sunset, squall, and cloud formation is a unique event—it can also seem unbearably monotonous, with nothing but sea, sky, and a little silver boat to occupy the eye, day after day. A visit from a sea creature is usually a welcome relief from the monotony—but I felt I might have to make an exception in this present case.

It was May 2009, and I was en route from Hawai’i to Tuvalu on the second stage of the Pacific crossing. I was rowing along, listening to an audiobook, as was my habit, when something caught my eye. I did a double take. A pointed fin was waving at me from the water’s surface.

I’d read reports by sailors of previous centuries of oceans teeming with creatures such as dolphins, whales, sharks, or turtles, but in my experience days could go by with no sighting. This might have been due to my low vantage point, or due to my being in a daze induced by the repetitive motion of rowing, but is also likely to be due to the much-diminished populations of many of these charismatic megafauna of the ocean. So wildlife sightings were rare enough, but to have the wildlife waving to me was rarer still. I moved over to that side of the boat to take a closer look.

It was hideous. Lying on its side while it lazily waved its pectoral fin in the air, the large, disc-shaped creature looked like a truncated version of a fish. Its body went straight from head to tail with nothing in between. The head occupied the front half of its body, and the tail was no more than a frill around the back half. Its appearance deeply disturbed me. Was this mutant a terrible consequence of our pollution of the oceans?

Fortunately not. I mentioned the odd fish in my next blog post, and the social media network provided the answer. It was a sunfish, well known for basking at the surface of the ocean—while waving its fin. I was relieved to find that this was not some unnatural, man-made, genetically modified monster, but actually a rather rare and special fish, made exactly as nature intended it to be: pug ugly.

I hadn’t seen many interesting creatures on the first stage of the Pacific crossing, between San Francisco and Hawai’i—a few dolphins, the occasional whale, and birds almost every day. I had to wait until this second stage to hit the real mother lode of marine wildlife.

TURTLES ARE AMONG MY FAVOURITE creatures. They have an air of benevolence and wisdom that convinces me that they’re old souls returned to Earth to watch over vulnerable seafarers. While I was scuba diving

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