Day 7

Air / Water temperature: 21°C (16°C at night) / 15°C

Wind direction / Bft: South-southeast / 2-4

Area: SAXA PECORIFORMA (low salinity) – Nautical chart showing the route

Combuse: Golden redfish (800 kg) remove intestines and gills, scale, rinse and pat dry. Rub inside and out with a little salt and some olive oil. Put slices of 1/2 lemon and 3 sprigs of thyme in the abdominal cavity. Set fish on large piece of aluminium foil. Drape around the fish 15 lightly pressed black olives with stone, 8 crushed cloves of garlic, 2 fresh hot peppers, thinly sliced, 3 sprigs thyme. Arrange slices of 1/2 lemon on top of the fish. Sprinkle with black pepper and drizzle with a little olive oil. Close foil well and cook fish 20 minutes in hot oven at 200°. Remove from oven and let sit 5 minutes. (More recipes from the Chief cook of «PS Narina»)

Today, I‘ve discovered yet another passenger on board: one approximately 2 cm-long common whelk with an olive-brown shell with a bit of moss-green algae stuck to its rear in grotesque fashion – about as bizarre as a piece of snot hanging out of a nostril. The painfulness of it preoccupied me, especially because I cannot tear myself away from the conviction that the sole accident of life in Nature is the human being. Which implies that man is not part of Nature – or, at the very least that he belongs to it in a very special way. I find it totally unimportant to propound this view to all and sundry. Perhaps because I find a somewhat improvised self-image or self-concept less constricting than a clearly defined one. So, I concentrate on the whelk. In tiny, reverse movements it pushes itself over the ship’s side and picks up, en route, the algae that has collected on it since our cast off. One can barely see its body, so close sits its shell-house on the fine algae-carpet. The waves splash heavily against its shell, but so terrific is the creature’s power of suction that it simply cannot be thrown off the surface of the boat. In my imagination I lift the creature out of the water and place it next to Oscar in front of me. But Oscar looks so mortified when I do so that I promptly put his competitor back in the water.

I have no inkling precisely when we brought the whelk on board – though it is not really on board, but somewhere between the water and the boat. So much so that it could well ask itself if it belonged to the world of the boat or the world of the water –but it probably doesn’t. But now, it is attacked by a particularly vicious wave and its shell is upside down. Now the whelk’s body hangs from its house like a sliver of snot. That must be its end; the end of a whelk. But, hey presto, it moves again to fasten itself to the surface once more and begins to push itself very slowly back into its shell.

Next day (8)

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