Mar 5 - At Sea

SANDY SHORE : Eerily we turned the ship around this morning about 10:00 am… seems like we can’t get out of Chile. A passenger went overboard around 4:30am. His traveling companions declared him missing at 9:30am. We started hearing announcements paging the individual shortly after this time and when he wasn’t located inside of an hour, we turned the vessel around to travel back to the area that the missing man was last seen, which took us some 4 or 5 hours south.

The Chilean Navy sent out a plane to meet us at sea where the MS Splendor performed a search and rescue mission for the rest of the day and into the evening. We followed a grid for hours at a slow speed, which created extreme listing at times and a low grade, intense vibe for those of us tapping into the frequency of the situation. I talked to some folks who did their best to avoid the reality of our “day at sea” and they even admitted to feeling a sense of somberness.

We have no idea what happened… Suicide? Homicide? Not sure. The individual was a 63-year-old male who boarded the ship in Santiago/Valparaiso. We just kept thinking about how cold and dark the water must have been and of course we wondered what would make someone jump, if indeed that’s what happened.

This can be a very disconnected world we live in. Despite all of the impressive communication technology connecting us all, including the ability to post travel journals on a Website for all to see around the world… loneliness still exists and often persists. Just like happiness, despair travels in waves.

We did what we could to mourn the stranger and to process his passing by celebrating life… our lives. We collaborated with our friend Ken, who we recognize as a soul mate and the three of us commemorated the significance of sailing to the end of the world and around Cape Horn together and we memorialized the event for the rest of our lives with tattoos that Donna designed implementing a compass, a south facing fleur de lis and the words “Fin del Mundo” (End of the World). It was a long, soulful night filled with equal parts depth and silliness as well as observations and epiphanies.

Each tattoo is numbered. 1, 2, 3… I call us Tres Estrellas (3 Stars) and I know that no matter where we all are in the world, there will always be a shared brightness and every time we look at our shared tats, we’ll have that night and this trip… and we may even remember the poor soul that fell into the blue deep the night prior and how we all chose life. ~ss