Beware of flying fish at night
I was writing an essay on the Problem of Evil, essentially why does evil exist if God is good, and reading Richard Swinburne's (Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Oxford) argument for the existence of both a good God and natural evil such as floods and disease without contradiction. An email arrived from Nick, the Secretary of the Royal Engineer Yacht Club, about an opportunity to sail across the Atlantic with James, a highly experienced sailor, who needed crew to take his boat from St Lucia to Antigua then longer stretches to Bermuda, the Azores, and back to the only place I'd been on the list, Portsmouth.
Patrick, a friend who had sailed alone across the Atlantic in his early twenties and in the 1973 Fastnet race suggested equipment (decent set of oilies with a hood, some small towels to put around your neck under the oilies to catch the drips in heavy weather, a decent pair of sea boots, decent socks, a foldable knife and marlinspike on a lanyard, a small personal torch) and advised me to,
"Beware of flying fish at night, you will know all about it if you are hit in the face by one. Collect them from the deck in the morning they are excellent eating just like mackerel just fry in a little butter."
James had taken his boat across the Atlantic in the 2024 Arc Race (Atlantic Rally for Cruisers) which sees hundreds of boats cross from Gran Canaria to St Lucia. Those two locations gave me the impression of sunny beaches and calm water but a sitrep he sent along the way shows what the weather can do,
"During the last 24 hours, we have been through the longest and hardest deluge of persistent rain that any of us have ever experienced, accompanied by the longest and most vivid lightning show that any of us have ever experienced. During these storms, the winds have randomly switched direction, boxing the compass as they did so, and varied in strength from less than five to gusts of more than 40 knots. At various points thunder has accompanied the almost continuous lightning."
It was not a passage to be taken lightly.
ARC 2024 had also sadly seen a 33 year old Swedish sailor lost at sea, Dag Eresund went overboard on 2 December 2024 at 02:27 UTC.
James's log,
"This morning we heard the tragic news that a man has been lost overboard from Ocean Breeze, one of the leading yachts in the Racing Division...A crewman aboard Ocean Breeze went overboard at 0227 hours yesterday. Although wearing a lifejacket fitted with an AIS Beacon, contact with him was lost and the search, involving two other ARC Yachts and two more in the vicinity, was abandoned at 2045 hours that evening. Our thoughts are with Dag's family and friends and also with the rest of the crew of Ocean Breeze. Like ourselves, the great majority of the ARC Fleet were in no position to be of any immediate help. Like ourselves, all of us will be reflecting the risks that we take not just when ocean sailing but also during our everyday lives. We will all take extra care to look after each other and ensure that we arrive safely in St Lucia."
We had a call and he asked about my experience which was a total of eight days so far, he told me it was hard to judge how a person would react to realising they are on a small floating platform on the sea and cannot see land around them, the passage would see us sail between islands and to where land seemed invisible. He told me about the Caribbean, I'd never been, wanting to learn more read a little from VS Naipaul's The Middle Passage from 1962, his first non-fiction book, in which he writes,
"The Caribbean has been described as Europe’s other sea, the Mediterranean of the New World. It was a Mediterranean which summoned up every dark human instinct without the complementary impulses towards nobility and beauty of older lands, a Mediterranean where civilization turned satanic, perverting those it attracted. And if one considers this sea, which the tourist now enlivens with his fantastic uniform, as a wasteful consumer of men through more than three centuries – the aboriginal population of some millions wiped out; the insatiable plantations: 300,000 slaves taken to Surinam, which today has a Negro population of 90,000; the interminable wars: 40,000 British soldiers dead between 1794 and 1796 alone, and another 40,000 discharged as unfit – it would seem that simply to have survived in the West Indies is to have triumphed."
Along with Naipaul, I found Patrick Leigh Fermor's The Traveller’s Tree, a friend from Bermuda recommended The History of Mary Prince and William Strachey's A Voyage to Virginia in 1609. I'd not be able to read them all but made a list and carried on with Swinburne's argument for evil and god. Soldiers will have heard on early morning log runs in the winter that it is character building, similarly Swinburne makes the point suffering offers an opportunity to react ‘well or badly’ and that we have to have evil to compare good against. Against him, John Hick (in Pereboom) argues some evil is too much, that it does not build people, instead destroys them. I'd have a lot of time to think on this on the water.
Logbook:
Until the next time thank you for reading and please share this post with friends,
Adnan
Hornet Services Sailing Club, Gosport, 2025
Adnan Sarwar is a philosophy student at the University of Oxford and a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He won The Bodley Head/Financial Times essay prize, edited for The Economist and is an Iraq war veteran of the British Army.
References
Naipual, V.S. (2011) The Middle Passage. London:Picador
Pereboom, D. (2005) in The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Religion, Mann, W.E. (ed). Oxford:Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Sterba, J. and Swinburne, R. (2024) Could a Good God Permit So Much Suffering? A Debate. Oxford:Oxford University Press
Wood, A (2024) MOB yacht Ocean Breeze arrives in St Lucia, [Online] Practical Boat Owner Available at: https://www.pbo.co.uk/news/mob-yacht-ocean-breeze-arrives-in-st-lucia-92399, Accessed 19 April 2025