Estancia

40 horses ahead, on the ridge.

Slowly up the hill towards the top of the herd.

Looking down at them, free with 100,000 acres of Argentine wilderness and the Andean mountain tops.

Time to go.

I yell a round up call. Each rider has their own mantra to move a herd. Youuuuuuu-whoooop.

Down the hill they scatter, the other riders wait ahead to keep the direction consistent.

The dust rises to the horses necks as we speed pass. We keep to our sides as we spin our reins around, making our horses go faster. To keep up.

Blurs of movement are kept steady by the mountains in front of us. We look at each other smiling. Free.

Without boundaries. Free.

The horse’s back opens up, the gallop is smooth, in step with each footing, moving with the herd, moving together.

Not in control or without it. Only in motion together.

Into the estancia, slower now, pat on the neck, thank you for allowing me to be as free as you.

Thank you for one of the deepest memories I own.

Buenos Aires

The summer pomperos illuminate the city that prefers to say goodnight to the rising sun.

A peaceful place with tree lined blocks, always singing with the inhabitants of the branches.

Each pass from routine walks will have new establishments found.

The work schedules are set by the owners, not the customers.

It is never known what will be open or closed and what is hidden in plain sight.

The amount of museums and bookstores creates belief the world is silently relying on Buenos Aires to preserve history.

Feather dusters replace brooms.

There is no balance required for the subway.

A mercado asks you to move slow, as to not miss the smallest gem possible of finding.

Adjust your emotions to the metronome of Buenos Aires and move with ease.

There is no place to be and no place to miss.

A cafe, to sit, drink, and relax without pressure of leaving.

Solitude among a table, coffee, wrapped pastry, the hypnosis found in the reflection of a ceiling fan from a spoon, and the view of the slow moving pavement.  

People's time is genuine and shared with generosity for conversation through speech or gestures.

A thank you is always followed by a “No, please, thank you”

Construction workers smile as lottery winners when they carry their trays of meat through the streets from their job site to sit down on the sidewalk and share a meal.  

Carne is soul, the accordion is the spirit, and azucar will find the table before water.

A city for the active rest.

Not the Paris of the continent it is on.

One of the suns of South America.

Its own identity among the world.

Buenos Aires.   

Sail Handling And Rigging

Learning the design and rigging of a Tall ship is challenging. To be a useful crew member, you have to study the systems on board and memorize where all of the ropes are for specific sails, masts, and yards. When my watch allows, I spend an hour a day in our ship's library studying our rig.

The Bark Europa has a foremast, mainmast, and mizzenmast along with 30 sails including the six studding sails. The ropes that control these masts for bracing/raising or setting the sails are connected to wooden pins on the deck. The pin holds the tension of the rope against the rigging. When we are done setting the sails we "make fast." This means to make three clockwise turns around the pin. We have over 200 of these pins, and each one is unmarked.

There is some logic behind all of the rigging, but the only way to remember the purpose of all of the pins/ropes is to study the ships rigging and practice answering the Captains/1st Mates commands on deck. A typical command we have is to brace the yards.

"Brace the foreyards on the Fore Main Course, the Fore Lower Topsail, and the Fore Topgallant to starboard."

Bracing the yards requires at least six people to haul on the yards on one side and to ease the lines on another. This procedure allows us to change course. We say "2 - 6 - Haul" to keep us together when pulling ropes or to sweat lines (this is a technique used to get the extra slack out of the ropes). A rope in rhythm is easily pulled, a rope out of rhythm is awkward like watching someone who can't dance.

When we are done adjusting the sails, we coil the ropes. Every rope onboard has to be coiled and made fast on a pin. Coiling keeps the rope untangled, ready to be adjusted if needed, and a clean deck. Coiling and hauling on ropes is the activity that never ends.

It has taken me these past four weeks to understand half of the foundation for these systems. There are moments when I start to know how each of the hundreds of ropes feel and I recognize the look of the unidentifiable wooden pins.

Maintenance on a Tall Ship

The Bark Europa's identity ranges from serving as a lightship in Germany to becoming a Dutch sailing training vessel. The ship's history defines itself with a purposeful existence and requires everyday maintenance. While learning to sail and live on board, I've found the maintenance most rewarding.

I've learned to make ratlines for the ladder up to the Sky Sail at 9 stories high, help the crew weld, worked on outboard engines, wash the deck, repair fiberglass on our life rafts, stitch up Zodiacs, varnish blocks, scrap/sand the wooden structures for unwanted marks, changed heavy weather sails at sea to replace the yards with tropical sails, and started making my own rigging tools such as a Marlinspike, Rigging Knife, and leather belt/sheath to hold it properly when working in the rigging.

There is always something to work on or improve on board. Our workbench at sea has the Ocean on our starboard and a Tall ship to stand on. We have all we need.

Oud Scheveningen | Bark Europa

Scheveningen is a beautiful old port town with unobstructed views of the North Sea. It reminds me of any other sea town you might find in New England. There is a relaxing feeling here. The homes are compact but look comfortable and offer welcoming gestures such as a bench next to their front doors or a seating table that is within inches from the brick-lined streets.

The restaurants are fish markets that have tables. Their entrances share the road with all of the delivery trucks, transporting the goods/fresh fish to their next destination. I ordered Herring on Toast last night from a local market. This meal served whole and raw, as the fish was most likely earlier in the day. It is a traditional food in The Netherlands, and while it might seem odd to visitors, it is delicious and tastes as fresh as it looks. Eating something as pure as raw herring without any seasoning was quite enjoyable. I found out later that this is a common offering and has been a traditional meal for over 600 years. 

After dinner, I saw the Bark Europa pulling into the harbor.  The masts, taller than most of the surrounding buildings make the ship's presence magnificent. 

You can compare watching the ship pass all of the modern boats to watching George Washington heading to Fraunces Tavern in 2018. As he walks past the financial professionals dressed in their fashionable clothes, all of the people stop to stare and wonder where someone clothed from 200 plus years ago is going.  

Everyone around the port stops in their tracks and takes out their phone to photograph the boat. They stop going about their day to watch an old way of the world. It's truly a majestic view. I get closer to the ship trying to study all of the intricacies, and it is overwhelming. 

I'm looking forward to calling the Europa home soon. 

Conversation

Conversing with someone you are meeting for the first time is selfless if you choose to engage in conversation truly.

Conversation happens when individuals decide to engage the person they are speaking with in hopes of understanding them fully. 

If you are self-initiating the discussion of your own experiences for a long period, then you are speaking to someone who is listening politely, or they are asking you engaging questions so that they might understand you and assist in your ability to converse. This is an enjoyable feeling when someone gives you the ability to share your own experiences and asks questions that help you find out more about yourself. 

Here is a quick example. 

You meet someone who recently spent a week at a monastery meditating or trying to find some significant meaning. Instead of asking them "How was it" or immediately say "I could never do that," ask a specific question that signals to them that you are listening and you want to understand their experience. Try saying "What color best represents the monastery?" or "What did breakfast smell like?". These are the type of approaches that can make a 15-30 minute conversation with a stranger memorable vs. any other small talk interaction. 

The people I've been fortunate to meet have so much to share, and for me, it's the reward in hearing about their experiences that make engaging them a natural mindset vs. looking for a chance to talk about what I'm doing. The odds of having meaningful connections are usually in ones favor when meeting people traveling/living in culturally rich cities because chances are their curiosity to travel or live where they are, can generate many life experiences that are just waiting to be tapped into. 

If you're lucky enough to meet someone that has the same mindset, then you'll have the same experience you provided. This is the difference between building a friendship and loving a person compared to just knowing someone. 

Great conversation is to listen carefully and engage purposefully. 

Daily, New York

The only place I'll ever call Home. New York City

Uploaded by John Monastero on 2018-08-11.

On Change

I believe the chance to travel without the security of a job is one of the great privileges one can have. There are plenty of resources out there that can teach you how to save and budget for the proper amount of financial support one might need. This post is not about how, but rather why I'm choosing to leave my home and all the safeties a job can offer for a chance to learn something different. 

The world is changing faster than we can comprehend and while our daily tools or luxuries might seem required to function, they are are all still very new to the world.

For example, the first GPS satellite was released in 1978 making the technology only 40 years old. Before GPS, the world faced disasters at sea due to the challenge of determining the longitude of a ship's position. This problem dates back to Eratosthenes, a Greek scholar who was the first recorded person to invent Geography and propose the idea of having a grid system to navigate the world in/around 255 BC. 

The world reached a breaking point in 1714 with there being too many deaths at sea. The Longitude Act was created by an Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom in July of 1714. Parliament was asking the world to come together and solve for Longitude for a financial reward and to benefit humanity. 

John Harrison then invented a marine chronometer, which simply put, is a compact watch that can keep time accurately at sea.

The theory was if you know what time it is in Greenwich, no matter where you are in the world, you can then calculate your Longitude. Now you know why Greenwich Mean Time is used so frequently as reference points with the world keeping time and navigation. 

As Wikipedia puts it: 
"Time equals longitude. Since the Earth rotates at a steady rate of 360° per day, or 15° per hour (in mean solar time), there is a direct relationship between time and longitude. If the navigator knew the time at a fixed reference point when some event occurred at the ship's location, the difference between the reference time and the apparent local time would give the ship's position relative to the fixed location. Finding apparent local time is relatively easy. The problem, ultimately, was how to determine the time at a distant reference point while on a ship." 

John Harrison dedicated his life to solving this problem and received partial recognition by Parliment throughout his contributions and when he was 80 years old in 1773 earned as much credit as he could for solving Longitude at sea. No one was ever awarded full credit for solving the problem. 

It took the world close to 2,000 years to get to the point where navigation is a thoughtless task that is handled by mobile devices connected to computers/satellites. I find this accomplishment genuinely incredible and remind myself every time I use Google Maps how far the world has developed itself. 

Part of the reason I'm choosing to leave my job/home is for a chance to become connected to this history. By learning how to navigate through a sextant/marine chronometer when crossing the Atlantic or becoming more intuned with the weather patterns while living in Patagonia, Argentina. All of these skills I believe allow one to hopefully become more observant to the world and understand all it has to offer without the reliance on modern technology. 

I'm driven by gaining this understanding.  Hopefully, when I'm older one day and reading of the brave navigators to round Cape Horn or venture towards California, I will have felt what they did just for a moment in my time. To become connected to the long history of the world in my short experiences.