Joining Neptune’s Boozy Cadre of Adventurers and Miscreants
Joining Neptune’s Boozy Cadre of Adventurers and Miscreants
Wine on the Equator
“What day is it?”
“No idea.”
“Tuesday?”
“It’s Friday,” said Alan, the skipper.
“Where are we?”
I looked at the chart. “Eight minutes.”
That is, we were zero degrees and eight minutes north of the equator. Eight minutes, eight nautical miles. It was the only ‘where’ that counted. We had left Costa Rica in Alan’s 46′ sloop twelve days before, and it would be another fifteen days until we next sighted land in French Polynesia. Longitude was meaningless. We hadn’t seen another boat for a week.
“How long to the equator, navigator?” asked Alan.
I looked at the compass and our speed, then guessed. “Two hours?”
“Uno roundo!” he said in his Australian-pidgin-Spanish, kicking off our daily happy hour ritual. He trudged downstairs to round up three Costa Rican lagers from the icebox, and brought them up in their Australia-flag beer koozies.
We sat silently for the first round, as usual. After twelve days on a smallish boat, there wasn’t much left to say.
I brought up the second, habitually last, round. “This is my first time sailing across the equator,” I mentioned, somewhat self-consciously but supremely excited.
“No way!”
“A virgin! There’s a ritual for this!” Alan exclaimed. We finished our second beers as the two older guys told stories about their first time across the equator. Alan chugged the rest of his lager and ducked below.
“How much time left?” he yelled from the cabin.
“We’ll cross it in five minutes or so.”
“Shit, put’r in neutral!” he joked.
With a minute to spare, Alan climbed up out of the cabin wearing a conical paper birthday hat (for someone’s third birthday) and a pair of Elton John sunglasses. He had the six-foot boat hook under his arm and a magnum of cheap Chilean wine and some plastic cups in his hands. He quickly poured us all a pint of the red.
I sat at the helm, beaming in the golden-hour glow, our sails only half full. Alan held his glass aloft and began the ritual.
“As the representative of King Neptune, Lord of the Seas, I knight thee,” he proclaimed, touching each of my shoulders with the aluminum boat hook. “Arise, knight, and take your place at Neptune’s side!”
I stood, and he poured some of the red out onto my head. It dribbled down my beard and onto my Blue Jays sweater, where it left a permanent reminder of my induction into Neptune’s boozy cadre of global wanderers, adventurers, and miscreants.