One year ago, I was sitting with
Kaki in Santa Rita beach, and discussing one of my favourite weltschmertzs: how
we, sons and daughters of the best educated, most prosperous, war-free
generations, have come to live so uninteresting, vulgar and monotonous lives.
Sure, the stories
of our parents, grandparents and ancestors always have a golden halo around
them, told in the distance, with foggy eyes (there is a word for this in
Portuguese, its called saudade).
So in that week of
sun-bathing, octopus-rice-and-fillets eating and boca-doce drinking, I told
Kaki: "We need to do something different for our leisure time - we should
go sailing the Azores!"
A bold Portuguese
man as Kaki is (one could call him reckless), he joined my adventure right
there. We were only missing a crew and a skipper... and a
boat!
Fast forward one
year, as we talked excitedly in our dull daily lives with our friends, and one
by one, the crew came around! Boys-only-club, that was a requirement - my good
friend Pedro Geirinhas (who will from now on be known as Geirinhas, or G) was
in right from the start (clearly not knowing what a week trapped in a boat with
Kaki would be), and then João Mareco (the Captain, Skipper, Admiral and
Commodore of our trip) who really made the whole thing happen, as he was the
only guy who really knew how to sail.
Then came Ryan
Schemmel, the Yankee, who I hosted in Lisbon due to a request coming from
London, and (Pedro) Bizarro, who casually said "yes" either when we
were drinking beers in London or having dinner in Luxembourg.
As I write these
words down, driven by the need to have something more set into bits and bytes
(stone is so old school) than just endless photos to populate Facebook, I
pledge myself to capturing the essence (as it is perceived by this observer's
scope) of this nautical trip - it's participants, it's encounters, it's ephemerides.
I know not what we
will encounter, but I somehow feel that when we come back to our mundane lives,
nine days from now, we will carry with us much more that what we have today.
