After two sleepless nights, Maddie was starting to wear thin. She couldn't sleep because of the waves smacking the stern. In the morning I looked at the weather forecast and saw that they were calling for severe thunderstorms that night; this meant that it would be a night of waves smacking while being rocked around.
To appease the admiral, I decided to plot a course for somewhere nice where we could recharge our batteries, be protected from the winds and waves, and rest up! St. Mary's River was our destination!
Mind you this, we could have sailed South on a beam to broad reach and covered insane amounts of ground, but for the Admirals happiness, we tacked up the river towards our destination.
We sailed into the mouth of St. Mary's River until the winds died and the waves disappeared, which was right at the entrance! I didn't want to go too far in as this would make it harder to leave in the morning. We dropped anchor into a soft sandy bottom with excellent holding about 0.5 miles from shore.
Morty was the most excited of all, as this meant a trip to shore. He normally goes on the deck, but he will hold it all day hoping that we will take him to shore. When night falls and he accepts his fate, he will usually go up on the port bow and do his business.
We were greeted by many birds upon our arrival, a pelican was the first to pass by. As we rowed to shore, we found so many more birds roosting along the way.
When we arrived at the white beach, we realized that it was not sand we were standing on, but in fact shells! Each grain of sand was a tiny complete shell, at most 3mm across. The entire beach was a giant gathering of shells! It made me feel so small and insignificant to think about each clam that once lived to make that shell, and how now they are all cast up onto each other to create a shoreline where we can beach our dinghy and walk along millions of memories of clams that once were, easily overlooking their existence as we passed by, just like every wave that rolls onto this shore.
Zoom in and out to see the beach fades away into the bay, and think about how many other beaches are visible in the bay. Keep zooming out and see how everything fades away. What stands out to you? Let me know in the comments.
It made me wonder about our own existence. We live our lives, think we are important, admire our talents, work on our faults, all while trying to make something of our lives, and then we die. When you pick up one single shell, it seems so great and special; but then you pick up a few, and they kind of look similar to the next. When you pick up a handful, they just blend together; and when you drop it back onto the beach, each shell fades away into the landscape. Are we the same? If you zoom out on us, do we just blend into the city? Into the landscape? As you zoom out even further, we seem to disappear all together. What if this beach was the same as our planet? There is another beach that looks similar enough on the other shore. Would this make the river a solar system, the bay a galaxy, and the ocean the universe? If each grain of sand on this beach was a life, how significant and small is our own life in this world?
It's a shame none of the shells had awesome colors to stand out like Wisdom does with her tanbark sails in a sea of white sails!
We cast off from this beach and made our way back to Wisdom for the night. The beach lay silent and alone, as the waves continued to meet it, as they did before we arrived, and as they will continue to do long after we are gone.
We did choose the perfect place to hide from the storm, as this is what the seas were as the storm raged up the bay that evening.
We settled in for a very calm night, grilled a wonderful dinner and relaxed! For the first time in the whole trip, I was able to sit back and read my book! I had always been working the sails to keep us on track that I couldn't divert my attention away to read and sail. When I would raise my head from my book, we would usually be about 5 to 10 degrees off course. This meant a good amount of distance lost when sailing to windward!
What are your thoughts on the beach? Do you think it relates to the world we live in when viewed from an outsiders perspective? In the end, are we all but grains of sand on some beach? Leave a comment down below to let me know what you think!
