Rough Seas and Wild Rivers

Saturday, January 10
N13° 45.4’/W61° 36.2, west of St Lucia, 130 NM from Barbados. Seas are rough, winds out of the northeast at 22, barometer 30.00 steady. Somewhere southwest of is the estuary of the Orinoco, but it is of little or no impact here. Yet, the seas are swirling in unsteady eddies, for awhile from the right, then later from the left and always on the nose. Our speed is only 6.5 knots.

I like wild rivers and hope to see every one of them, the Yarling Tsang-Po, the Wahge, the canyon of the Blue Nile, the upper Amazon…I recall being a young Air Force pilot with access to the world’s maps. I spent a lot of time in the map room. One of the survival manuals spoke of techniques for survival in river country. Of the Orinoco, it said “Survival in this region is not likely.” I checked the 1:250,000 aviation chart of the Orinoco from its estuary south. Within fifty miles there was only white paper with the notation “Relief Data Not Available”. In those days, cartographers were needed to make maps, and no one could get up there and survive to come back. I knew some cartographers in the Air Force. One had a story of being attacked by baboons in Ethiopia and actually losing men to the beasts. Four-hundred inches of rain annually, they surmise falls in the Orinoco basin. With satellites came unlimited mapping capacity, and all the world’s rivers—and other features—can be seen now. People have now been up the Orinoco and back with films of wild canyons and spectacular mountains. I’d still like to do it. In my next life, I shall be a river runner.

One of my fantasies has been to run the entire Amazon, from the Urubamba all the way to Belize. At its estuary, the river is 200 miles across, bearing 20% of the fresh water of the planet. Its banks explore the last of the unexplored, and that will not last long. The Chinese claim that fewer than two hundred outsiders have ever even seen the Rainbow falls of the Tsang-Po. Two rivers are said to be un-runnable: the Tsang-Po and the Wahge in Papua, New Guinea.

We are now two hours ahead of the clock on which we started, and will move our clocks up another hour in three or four days. College football is over, and I am glad for once. The bureaucrats and press gangs have turned it into a beauty contest. The BCS is a total failure, and it disappoints many. Texas defeated five top eleven teams this year, won their fifth consecutive bowl game, and actually dropped in the polls. No team has ever accomplished what they did. Neither have the polls.