A Wish A Rain

The hull tilted to the beam sea and I didn’t care anymore.

I could see the buildings along the sea wall of Cartagena and a few heads moving and still along the parapet that was built to keep out English pirates. I sat wedged against the starboard cockpit coaming, my hand resting on the winch to steady myself as the boat tilted again to a beam sea. I shifted a bit placing my butt more into the corner of the cabin and coaming. My leg went up automatically placing my foot on the bridge deck at the hatchway. My feet were bare with a shimmer of wet.

I looked at the boom with the sail a crumbled mess from my lazy job of trying to tie it off with that damn beam swell throwing me about. The self-steering jerked about but kept on course. I looked back down at my stomach folds glistening with little sparklings of sunlight. I saw that the sun was still nearer to midday than to afternoon and did not want to look up anymore with my future being elongated by its slow, too slow movement across the sky. A drop of sweat moved from a crease to the cockpit seat without a splash. It just moved on down my side. I could feel it on its way to the seat, then it just landed. No splash. Just became a part of the boat.

My eyes moved back to where the droplet’s old home was about midway down my stomach. There, at my navel, I saw a puddle that was almost full of sweat. It wasn’t just sweat, it was water from my body. The boat tilted again and a little water spilled out of my navel onto my skin and down into my crease and it disappeared like a shark into a reef alley. Well, my crease was smoother than a reef alley and more rounded but it was similar and it is too hot to argue with myself. I frowned at the remembrance of the heat. I was trying to keep away from that presence. The boat tilted again and I didn’t care. My shoulder kind of hurt rubbing against the coaming but I didn’t care about that either.

It had been a long trip from Panama and I was right near the Equator without wind. The boat tilted with a slight push forward making me look up and out forward to see Cartagena again. It looked the same as before. Rocky with a wall of parapets designed to let arrows and bullets and cannonballs fly at the filthy English invaders. I was filthy now. Sweating like a pig trying to invade Cartagena with the end of a trip. Out of the corner of my eye, or somewhere, another drip happened but I wasn’t sure where it came from but I knew, I felt it running down my side. I couldn’t identify it on the seat but I was sure it ran and fell. Maybe it didn’t fall yet? I looked down along my side but just saw skin.

I felt that my pubic hairs were moving a bit and that felt something that might have been a zepher of a tiny bit of breeze. The boat tilted and my hairs moved again. Settling, there was no breeze just movement. How sad. There were no clouds to meet my gaze. How sad. Then, it occurred to me that I was doing what I wanted to do and below deck there was food, water, beer and even a few bags of potato chips. I had peanut butter and some bread. I had jam and sweet pickles. They were down below and I was up here. The boat tilted again but was followed quickly by another tilt, then resettled. I rose a bit and looked around at the seas but they were just looking friendly with the small swells coming my way.

There was a nagging starting up that was trying to go back to the food below and the fact that I was making a voyage that most people dreamed about doing. Yes, I told myself, maybe aloud. Yes, I was sailing, well maybe not right now, but I was sailing in the Caribbean after crossing the Panama Canal. The water below me was so clear most of the time that I could see at least fifty, sixty feet below. I could see fish trying to stay in the shadow of my boat. I could see octopus gracefully propelling themselves from that same shadow, and the dolphin, especially at night I could witness their smiling in the dark with phosphorescent lipstick.

Right now was just a minute in this voyage. I looked down my body quickly to catch a rivulet of sweat, no, water falling along my upper side from just under my breast. There was a droplet on the tip of my nipple about to jump into the rivulet. And it jumped, disappearing in the tiny rush of water that ran down along the side of my body. I was tanned to almost brown from that pale yellowish colour I have in the city. I love this colour. I thought of how I would look with my white, well sort of white shirt walking down the street in Cartagena. That made me conscious of being out in the cockpit naked and those people up on the parapet being able to see me naked. I looked at Cartagena again and shook my head, not too much in this heat, recognising that nobody could see me this far out or at least I would just be a blurred figure huddled in the corner of a boat.

A breeze caught the end of that sentence and I looked up and out but the boat tilted and I had to wait until it settled again to see over the side at the minuscule shadow rippling of the water and recognised that there was a breeze forming. The sweat, I mean water on my skin began to take on a life of caressing in place of just sitting there and dripping from there. I could feel all of the wetness on my body and I felt like getting up and making a peanut butter sandwich but decided to wait and get more energy from these little touchings of air. I was enjoying this coming of life and I closed my eyes as though I could enjoy it more. Then, the sailor in me took over and I looked up at the mainsail still in rude bundles on the boom. The jib was filling though and I laughed out loud. But, it was time to get those ties off the main sail and raise it to capture this breath from nature.

I looked over at Cartagena and it looked closer. I shook my head at that thinking that it had only been a few minutes that had passed since I looked and it was far away. I grabbed my shorts anyway and pulled them on, got up on my feet. The boat tilted and I sat down again, but got up and climbed to the deck and up on the cabin top and started pulling the sail ties off and lacing them into my shorts top as I moved forward to the halyard. I un-cleated the halyard and pulled the sail up and off the boom. It rose and started filling slightly. My hands were wet with sweat, not water now. My arms were coated in shiny sweat and from my forehead droplets were falling into my eyes.

After cleating off the halyard again and running back to the cockpit I sheeted in both the jib and the mainsail until they held the light breeze and my course set me toward those parapets. The breeze increased and clouds materialised and a light pall of rain mixed with my sweat to become water. I was smiling and the tilt of hull was steady with rushing by waters setting little rainbows as I was pushed to Cartagena and bathed by a breeze.