Day 20

Air / Water temperature: 24°C (16°C at night) / 20°C

Wind direction / Bft: Southwest / 2-3

Area: MUSCI VALLIS (lots of flys in the air) – Nautical chart showing the route

Combuse: Giant gourami (1 kg) remove intestines, fillet, skin, rinse and pat dry. Make a paste in a blender with 2 small onions coarsely chopped, 6 cloves garlic chopped, 3 stalks lemon grass chopped, 4 fresh green chilli seeded, 6 bird's eye chilli. Warm 1 tablespoon of oil in a pan and fry the paste until it smells right. Add 2 tablespoons light soy sauce, 2 tablespoons fish sauce, 200 g bamboo shoots from brine sliced into fine strips, 4 dl water, bring to boil, reduce heat, simmer for 30 minutes until the sauce has adopted a firmer texture. Season with salt, add 40 sweet Thai basil leaves and 40 grams of finely chopped spring onions, cook briefly. Salt and pepper fish fillets, bake them in a little oil for three minutes per side until golden brown. Serve filets on some of the sauce. (More recipes from the Chief cook of «PS Narina»)

Summer weather. In the sky a cloud that looks like Pinocchio’s head surrounded by a halo, next to it Moby Dick, whose back sprouts a Lebanese cedar – or is it a harpoon with hooks that have turned around to pierce firmly into its flesh? And there, a hamburger that’s got an onion ring popping out of it. How can one write about cloud forms? About the form of something that changes with every blink of the eye? That’s like wanting to hang on to the form of a thought that flits a little farther away with every passing moment – even when we have put it firmly down in word and in script, as a photo-copy of sorts. Clouds are just like our thoughts: they flit fast suddenly or hang on stubbornly to the horizon, they thicken and they dissolve, they puff up. At times they are dark and at others light again, sometimes rosy, sometimes steel-blue, now blurred, later clear. Sometimes a cloud pushes itself through another that appears to be a fixed figure or drawing in the sky – it seems as if the inflexible form is moving playfully, yet it also appears to be all the more static. But then, just when we have begun to believe the image is unchangeable it changes – is it because the wind’s been blowing the clouds around, is it because something has happened in our memory. 

The similarity between clouds and thoughts is so close that every captain is bound to recognise it sooner or later. And definitely, he must have done this on a countless number of boats – though probably never on a paper boat.

Now, Oskar is also crawling like a cotton woolly creature over the horizon, followed by an ant with wings. And Moby Dick is basking in the glow of Pinocchio’s halo.

Next day (21)

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