The following is the account of Federico Fabrettipartner of Comin & Partners, who in the stormy night of a few days ago was on a boat on the Adriatic with his family returning from Croatia and for nine hours braved waves four meters high.
“The shore is safer, but I like to fight with the waves of the sea,” he wrote Emily Dickinson . Maybe it will be the desire to bring out our darkest part, it will be the desire for freedom or to see the limits of things closely. It will be the unconsciousness or the eternal feeling immortal that serves to keep human beings alive. The fact is, that when you reach the edge of life and touch the shipwreck, even the bravest man, the most experienced navigator, re-evaluates his abilities and relates them to external elements to which you again attribute, with honor, every invincible superiority. And the absolute value of life returns to the surface, as the basis of everything else.
The Atlantic disturbance that a few days ago hit our country with unusual violence and with all the energy accumulated in weeks of scorching heat, we met it in the middle of the Adriatic, on my sailing boat, returning from Croatia. I am not a particularly experienced navigator, but not a first-hairer either. I have known the sea for years, its pitfalls, its unpredictability, its strength. My sailboat is called Santiago, like the protagonist of “the Old Man and the Sea”, the novel by Hemingway that every navigator should read to become familiar with the liquid part of our Earth.
August, sailing holidays in Croatia with my family and a couple of friends. Eight beautiful days of sun and sea but then the work commitments that pressed, and also the personal ones, the children who absolutely had to meet friends. In short, we had to leave and return home. We register a meteorologically acceptable window of time between one storm and another and we decide to leave Vis to return to San Benedetto del Tronto.
At 10.30, with a light drizzle, we get rid of the mooring in the large bay of Vis, where the typical houses with red roofs are joined by the concrete eco monsters, the result of building speculations that have already disfigured our coasts in the 50s and 60. The instruments report a wind at 20 knots. We attempt the exit together with a modern Elan 50, with a very shiny black hull, and a slightly yellowed yacht from the 80s, Croatian flag.
After just half a mile, it begins to pour down so hard that we all decide to go back. Yacht included. Not bad, attached to the buoy we do a couple of coats of burraco below deck until the awaited opening of the sky. Punctual after about 1 hour the serene returns, a beautiful blue friend, accomplice. We go through the various weather and wind apps, and decide it was the right time to try again. Between a thrill and a goliardic laugh at each wave that shakes our soul, we leave and get back on course. The wind blows our hair and the technical jackets do their job well. The waves force us to open the sails a little to stabilize the hull: wind at 25 knots. Sunshine. We do the first 6 hours like this, between our slightly cheeky songs and some careful look at the dark spots around.
Around 6 pm I fall asleep in the warmth of the cockpit, my friend Andrea was at the helm. After half an hour, a whip on the starboard keel wakes me up and my friend warns me that the black shadow in front could not have been avoided, we would have ended up in it. It looked like the mouth of a sea monster, imposing. The white crest that edged the top like lace soon faded to a purple-blue in the shape of a mushroom cloud.
The wind rises to 35 knots and the waves begin to get high, at least 3 meters as we slowly enter the monster’s mouth. A small glimpse reveals the sunset and the feared arrival of darkness. At that point all hell breaks loose, the wind rises again and sends the waves to the starboard mascon. We close all the sails but the waves were unimaginable mountains of water of 4.5 meters messy, which in total darkness become trains launched at us with the lights off, on all sides but above all in the bow, lifting the boat and throwing it underneath. , with heavy and violent thuds.
Buckets of water spill over us, icy walls that break away from the darkness and appear suddenly, so close that I only have time to close my eyes. But we are forced to stand there, standing in the cockpit, behind the sprayhood, looking ahead, trying to spot, the faint lights of the ferries on whose routes we had inevitably ended up. We avoid 6, less than 150 meters. But we are tossed in every direction. My family is below decks praying, because in some cases those words become true, they acquire a meaning, a perspective, a hope to cling to. Perhaps, you tell yourself, the last.
It is in these roundabouts of endless hours, which never offer the vision of an end, in these somersaults in the middle of the void, weakened by the fists in the abdomen of a raging stormy sea, that thought begins to take its own paths, autonomously. , unmanageable: what if the engine breaks down now? What if we dismantle? I know what to do in these cases, but theory doesn’t always, indeed almost never, help you in reality. And in any case it is not enough for you, you feel naked, the slightly Gascon strength that the theoretical context gives you suddenly becomes the faded and unrecognizable portrait of reality, of its violence, of the inhuman strength of nature. We were at the mercy of the storm, of its irrepressible fury, and the hypothesis of the shipwreck was not just a school hypothesis, it was a real, concrete condition. Ours, at that moment.
Nine eternal hours of chaos in the dark, between lightning and lightning, which only luckily we managed to dodge, strong wind, powerful waves. When we saw the little lights of sister earth, I began to love that sea again. It took another 2 hours to get there, but we eventually reached the harbor entrance and took cover.
Thus life has resumed its usual rhythm, the one from which we had fled but to which we could not wait to return. And if now if I can tell this adventure to friends and acquaintances I cannot avoid a sense of guilt: the feeling of speaking with disrespectful detachment about something powerful, like death, which basically belongs to us, and which has touched me, my family and friends, whose lives had been entrusted to me the day before, lightly.
We “fought the waves of the sea”, returning to quote Dickinson. Which is a bit like challenging yourself, putting yourself to the test or, even more, choosing a life of overwhelming passions for one of soft comforts. But it is also the paradigm of the search for meaning and freedom in our time of digital anthropology that dehumanizes. Each experience leaves, in addition to its own mark on the soul, also a wealth of teachings. We should have had more respect. Respect for the sea, respect for its unpredictability. And in the same way, in the future we will have to have more respect for natural dynamics, for the environment, for the Earth house, of which we too often feel the masters and where instead we are only seasonal workers.