March 24 - April 14, 2002
Twenty-One Days at Sea
Passage to the Marquesas
by Lois Joy                       

This section encompasses a collection of stories and passage notes written while underway during the first leg of Voyage Two of Pacific Bliss, the 3252 nautical mile passage from San Diego, California to Atuona Harbor in the island of Hiva Oa, Marquesas, French Polynesia.
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April 9, 2002, 0015
0º47' N, 133º09.8' W
47 miles north of the equator
Stars of Wonder

Imagine yourself seated in the IMAX science museum theater in Balboa Park, San Diego (or any other similar observatory). The lights have dimmed. The room around you has become dark. Suddenly, all the constellations en masse burst upon the 180º dome surrounding you, a million flickering stars transporting you to another world, and you forget that your environment has been created for you by man.

You begin to glide gently forward, skimming the ocean waves. You know you are moving because you hear the slosh-slosh of the boat's hulls against the waves, the occasional creak-creak of the swaying mainsail, reaching high to the starry sky above. You become enthralled with the millions of flickering lights wherever you turn, and find that you are encased in a dome, surrounded by stars so tightly crowded together that they resemble a thousand Milky Ways.

You become mesmerized. You find many sections of the sky where you cannot even separate the individual stars from the primordial soup. You are seeing beyond to distant constellations that you've never heard of or seen before.

The back of your neck is hurting now, but still you strain to look upward. An audio portion of the program tells you that you are seeing the light of stars that are taking millions of light years to come to you and that the visible universe spans between 16 and 40 billion light years across. You feel unimportant, insignificant, but still you crane your neck ever upwards, in awe of the heavens spread out before you.

You have come with us, on Pacific Bliss this night, only 42 miles from the equator. I thank you for your company.

"A wonderfully starry night," I had written in my logbook. "The stuff dreams are made of." When I first came on the midnight to 3AM dogwatch tonight, I forgot that the purpose is to look for ships in the night. I was awestruck by the stars, mesmerized for the first ten minutes.

Tomorrow, we will cross the line. And of course, we will do all the crazy things sailors do: perform saltwater initiation rites, dress up in costumes, and offer champagne to the mythological gods of the sea.

But tonight, I cannot help but turn my thoughts to the real God, the Creator of all of this. How could I possibly begin to think that an insignificant spec in a little vessel, way down here, could make any difference, could even get the attention of this God who masterminded the creation of the universe? I think about it tonight, and it seems impossible. Yet I remember that I prayed about Ray, that we would solve the problem during the daylight hours, knowing that I feared going into the night without a working autopilot, (yes, I did, I admit it) and I felt that my prayers were answered. I've prayed for an answer to much bigger things, and received it. Perhaps He assigns a guardian angel to His children down here, because if I pray for a wee little thing, like a parking spot when I'm late for an appointment, it materializes for me. I cannot begin to understand it more than I can understand the reasons why God designed this whole universe. Did he design it for the race of man he would eventually create? Has he designed other races of men, and did they also foul things up so badly that he needed to make a redemption plan for them?

Everything speaks for super-intelligent design, yet did all that design work go into creating a habitat for the imperfect beings who live here? God created the perfect universe (Genesis 1:31) "God saw all that He had made, and it was very good."

NASA astronomer John O'Keefe said that to the astronomer, the Earth is a very sheltered and protected place. There is a marvelous picture from Apollo 8 of the blue and cloud-wrapped earth, seen just at the horizon of the black-cratered, torn and smashed lunar landscape. The contrast would not be lost on any creature. The thought, "God loves those people," cannot be resisted. Yet the moon is a friendly place compared to Venus, where, from skies 40 km high, a rain of concentrated sulphuric acid falls toward a surface that is as hot as boiling lead. Then O'Keefe went on to say that Venus is friendly compared to the cold and lonely vacuum that separates the stars, which is friendly compared to the crushing pressure of the white dwarfs or the unspeakable horrors of the black holes or neuron stars. "We are by astronomical standards, a pampered, cosseted, cherished group of creatures…if the Universe had not been made with the most exacting precision we could never have come into existence. It is my view that these circumstances were created for man to live in…Someone made a lot of special arrangements and took a lot of time so that each of us could be alive and experiencing this just-right world."

When I read passages in "Show Me God" (by Fred Heeren, Revised Edition ©2000) today, I did not know that it would be in preparation for this wondrous night.

I also did not know that so many believers led the way in science. The book's appendix summarizes fifty of them, from well-known names such as Bell, Boyle, Dalton, Faraday, Fleming, Joule, Lister, Maxwell, Mendel, Morse, Newton and Pasteur to lesser-known scientists such as Albright, Fabre, Flamsteed, Huggins, Michell, Theodoric of Freibourg, and others.

Next Section: Crossing the Line


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