The Atlantic crossing from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean has no middle in the sense that every other leg on the Naora route has a middle: there is no anchorage halfway, no provisioning port at the two-week mark, no island to stop at if the wind is not cooperating or the crew needs a rest.
There is Las Palmas at the beginning and there is the Caribbean at the end and between them there is 2,700 miles of open ocean in the northeast trade winds and three weeks of continuous sailing with nothing in any direction but the sea and the sky and the boat and the people on it.
This is the specific quality that makes the Atlantic crossing the most distinctive single leg on the Naora route: the absence of the middle, which is the absence of the option, which is the offshore condition that the member who is seeking the pure expression of what the voyage is at its most uncompromising chooses this leg for. The Mediterranean member can anchor if the leg becomes too intense.
The Atlantic member cannot. The trade winds carry them westward whether the westward movement is what the day requires or not, and the requirement to be present for the full duration regardless of the conditions is the specific demand that the Atlantic crossing makes that no other leg makes in the same form.
What the No-Middle Produces
The no-middle produces the specific quality of the offshore experience that the anchorage-rich legs cannot produce: the full removal of the option to interrupt the experience, which is the condition that the deepest versions of the experience the Naora voyage provides require.
The conversations on day fourteen of the Atlantic crossing is the conversation of a community that has not been anywhere else for two weeks and will not be anywhere else for another week. The people at it have been in each other’s company continuously without the relief of the port visit or the provisioning morning or the dive that structures the anchor day. The social context has been reduced to the boat and the ocean and the people on the boat and whatever the three weeks of the crossing have produced between them.
The arrival at the Caribbean after the Atlantic crossing is the arrival that every circumnavigator describes as the defining moment of the westward voyage: the first Caribbean island visible on the horizon after 2,700 miles of the open Atlantic, the smell of the land after three weeks of the ocean, the specific quality of the thing that has been completed arriving at the consciousness at the moment the anchor is set in the first Caribbean bay. This is what the no-middle leg produces at its end.
The member who chooses the Atlantic crossing is choosing the most specific expression of what it means to let the sea carry you from one world to another without the option of stopping halfway to check whether you still want to go.
