Lost at Sea

May 29, 2025 (another late night)

This is another 1/2 dispatch; I haven’t done this since Field Report #5 . It is less a fully formed memory as much as it is residue in my brain, eeking its way into some kind of shape. Not a narrative — this dispatch is more like an imprint of a moment that I desire to hold.

In the background, I cannot tell if it is a trained opera singer belting out some tunes or just an incredibly talented drunk bellowing (his friends applaud). Either way, his singing is echoing off the neighbouring concrete railway embankment like a warning or a blessing. Maybe both.

Tonight, I spent a few hours with Dušan. We got to talking about sailing; the kind of conversation that starts with logistics but veers into longing. Vanishing not so much as escape, but assent. As if the sea agreed to keep the secret.

Bas Jan Ader: I envisioned him catching his fish off the side of the boat and having a little mock-up barbecue pit and grilling his fish and having his fresh water supply, eating very little, fasting for a lot of it, and writing a lot in his journals.

Maybe I was fascinated by this conversation because of some half-formed thought that stuck in my head, refusing to let go. Or maybe something else. I don’t know why.

So I write this dispatch.

It is finished.It is finished. It is the mercy. Donald Crowhurst’s final log book entry, 1969.

On my way home, I thought of the artist Bas Jan Ader, who disappeared in 1975, his sloop found adrift in the Atlantic, his artwork incomplete. Or was it? And Donald Crowhurst (I always prefer to think of him as my namesake, rather than Donald Duck or any other idiot), who set off alone and never came back. Each of them set out with their own contract with the sea. Not to conquer it, but to be held by it, maybe even claimed.