January 26, Sunset, 48^°28'N, 124^°60'W
YESTERDAY WE SAW the first blue, daytime sky in almost a week—just a portal of it, like a window atop a dome. Now we're close to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, so close that gulls have begun visiting us and cell phones have started to work. Late last night in the crew's lounge, there was a party. Bob and Claire, who appear to be teetotalers, did not attend, but I did, as did Chief Officer Bollig, who's turned out to be a friendly German giant. Ronaldo Cuevas, the bosun—chief of the deckhands, Bacchus of the lounge, big, round-faced dude wearing a muscle tee and a Fu Manchu—seemed intent on getting me drunk. He refilled my tumbler of wine even when I told him not to. At least I managed to get Joe the messman to play "The Boxer" on his guitar.

I don't remember much of last night's party, but there is one night from this long, uneventful voyage that I think I will never forget, the one when I took my forbidden nocturnal walk. As I made my way along a catwalk glazed with sea spray and snow, I had to take cover behind a bulkhead every few yards to warm my ears and hands. Above me the containers creaked and moaned and clanged, straining at their lashings with every roll. I had intended to walk all the way to the stern, where water rains down from the containers overhead and the roar of the propeller makes the whole place thunder like a cavern under a cataract. But I thought better of it. The winds were at Beaufort Force 7, near gale, and just as Sir Beaufort promised, the sea had heaped up and foam was streaking off the crests of breakers 13 to 20 feet tall. You could see only the waves that came heaving and hissing along the hull, blue and foamy and luminous in the house light, but you could sense the rest of the Pacific, and if you looked hard, you could vaguely distinguish the greater darkness of the ocean from the lesser darkness of the starless sky. Standing at the starboard rail—facing south toward the spot 500 miles away where, on a night far stormier than this one, containers full of clothes and toys and fish and tables had gone crashing overboard—I gazed a long while into both varieties of darkness, the watery and the ethereal one, as if into the tenebrous seas and mists of time. Then, ears aching, hands numb, I turned around, leaned into the wind, and staggered to the crew's lounge for a little human company, a little Filipino television, and a tumbler of cheap red.