We came back to him after we had provisioned, clambered aboard, and made ready for one of those empty days which pass so quickly on board a boat: hours and hours during which nothing is done, hours which on shore would exasperate every nerve, but which here, on the soft movement of the sea, go past as easily as sleep. For time on the water is quite different from time on land. It is more continuous; it is more part of the breathing of the world; less mechanical and divided. There was not a breath of air, so there was no question of starting again during all those hours. The great rollers outside were now at last beginning to affect the harbour a little, and the Nona, with her too high topmast, swung rather heavily to the slight movement; but of wind not a stir. The falling of the gradual darkness brought on a night brilliant with stars and no moon. There we lay, sleeping and waking, smoking, talking a little, vacuous, ready to put up sail with the first hint of a wind and to get outside. But all that night until morning again, the calm continued.
How vast was that haven in the stillness: a mile of ebony water holding the stars and cut off like a lake from the deep by man! How admirable are the great works of man! But greater is God.
In the profound night and the silence I considered that wide space of shelter and the dyke man had made against the Atlantic Power.
For two hours I so pondered upon our strength and our nothingness, worshipping also the night until the stars had changed. Then I went down below and slept. But even with the dawn there came no breeze.
It was about half-past nine in the morning when there did come a draught from the northwards. There was very little of it; it hardly crisped the oily, lumping water of the great haven, but such as it was, we, weary of all this indolence, determined to take advantage of it and to set sail. So we took up the anchor and very slowly lay close to that breath of wind until we came to the breakwater ahead, and there we found the rollers outside large as though they were in the main ocean: so large that when we sank into their troughs there was no headway on the boat and the light air only caught her insufficiently upon the crests. Even as we thus attempted to make some way—lifted hugely up and down in a solemn sport of the sea, now seeing nothing but water astern and ahead and then, immediately after, the whole coast and its heights, and then down into the trough again—the little wind there was entirely failed us. We drifted aimlessly and in all the futility of such motion, up and down over the great swells and there even seemed to be a sort of slight drift. It was, perhaps, only the set of the swell taking us against our course back eastward and northward.
We took council together and determined that with the very first breath of air we could find we would run back to anchor and wait for a wind worth having. So we did, and a second day passed in Fishguard harbour, as empty as the first, and a second night; and then it was I completed the tune and first verse of a song called the “Chanty of the Nona.” The whole of that time the calm was broken by but few hints of very uncertain airs.
But just as dawn was beginning upon the third day, when it was already so light that the sea looked white against the black land, and before the first touch of colour had made living the edges of the inland hills, a heartening wind from those hills, cool with morning, fresh and heavy, not too strong, a friendly wind, a wind just suited to our course—for it was a point or two north of east—blew down from old Wales upon the sea.
Of this we took an immediate advantage and were out at once, my companion steering for the breakwater head at a good pace, while I made the anchor secure forward and then came back and joined him. We rounded the breakwater, took her well out and then gybed over with something of a clatter and a shock and ran down for Strumble, under the growing day. The great light was still flashing from its tower, standing on an island off the head, and the name of that island is Michael. Once we were round that headland, the wind was fairly on our port quarter and it was a merry race with a happy offshore wind all the way down to Saint David’s, so that not only the day but also the old land and the much older sea and the old boat, that was launched so long ago, and we ourselves, were for the moment young. So ran we down for Saint David’s and there, putting her nose due south, I, holding the tiller, headed her for that exceedingly dangerous millrace of a strait between
