The aircraft carrier bow dutifully plows the ocean as if pushing aside eternity, if only for a moment.The horizon retreats from our advance, sliding backward over the edge of nowhere to some other nowhere. Below the keel is water a mile deep, filling a cold dark trench fracturing the sea floor. If your feet don't touch, it doesn't matter how far down the bottom is.

We don't belong here, this place is for sharks and whales and typhoons and monsoons and azure swells a mountain high. Searing hot days are endless and the water would not bring life but death if you tried to escape the heat by plunging into the cool waves. This would place you firmly at the bottom of the food chain. The sea cares not who you are, what you do, where you're going. If you enter the water you join that chain, if you don't drown first.

We are sailing on a body of water covering one third of the earth's surface. 80,000 tons of steel stays afloat upon it, somehow. This steel is my home. I have nowhere else to go.

The journey I am on is as much a mystery to me as the deep blue Pacific itself.