Here is an excerpt from a posting by PUMA, currently sailing up the coast of Brazil finishing in Miami. It is a little ironic given what has been the sailing headlines in recent times here in the United States.
Early yesterday evening our course took us directly across the transom of a tiny wooden fishing boat, anchored no less than 50 miles from shore, and as we went by waving hello to four surprised locals at 18 knots, it’s impossible not to wonder if our new spectators have any comprehension of what they’ve witnessed. They have likely never laid eyes on a boat like ours, and likely never will again. A giant black jumping cat emblazoned on a tentacle-covered sailboat, a fast sailboat, faster than many powerboats. It must be bizarre but exhilarating, if only for a brief moment before we’re gone again, like a mysterious UFO just passing through.
Looking back on the six prior legs of this race, I wonder if the countless mariners we randomly intersect, lives we intermittently traverse in the middle of the worlds ocean: what did they do when they returned to land? Are they new PUMA Ocean Racing Facebook fans? Are they reading this update, avid followers of our plight like the sailors of the ZIM MONACO? Did they Instagram a photo of us from their fancy smart phone? Or not. Are we just an intense flash of a story on an otherwise typical workday for some seafarer that knows nothing of Volvo cars, PUMA clothing, carbon fiber, or the World Wide Web?
There was the ship of long liners off Sri Lanka, forcing us into a hard preventative bear away and a close race mark like rounding (I don’t know what was more impressive, the stench from their hold or Tony’s reaction on the helm). There were the countless unlit dinghies in the Malacca Straits, clueless as to the danger a night in our path could present. There was the teeming port of Singapore; an evening spent dodging and weaving through hundreds (maybe thousands) of anchored 300-meter ships. There were the fishing boats off Japan and the fishing boats off the Solomons. There was the fleet of halogen-lit squidders near Chile and then the busy trans-South Atlantic shipping lanes, the very one that brought us to our ZIM MONACO friends and eventual Tristan salvation.