Majuro, Marshall Islands, March 29th: To Infinity, but not quite beyond yet

What an amazing feeling, a sense of completion, to see Infinity floating in Majuro's lagoon, her two masts pointing to the clear, blue sky like arrows aimed at Heaven itself. I mean seriously, it's been nine frickin' months in the making during which I've pestered most of the people around me, and random strangers as well.

To finally be here, as my Majuro taxi driver is picking up and dropping off random strangers along the only road of the island, staring at the new Ford Rangers, the old decrepit houses next to large and freshly painted mansions ... it feels good. It feels great. What feels even beyond that is the total and utmost absence of expectations; this might be the reason why I could never answer the questions you all had such as "what are you going to do on the boat" or "aren't you scared you'll get bored". I couldn't answer them then, I can't answer them now.

I've met all the current crew members, so far eight guys and Clem's two girls Chloe and Rhian. More up on that later in the "Meet the team" tab I'll put up, or you can check out the Infinity website and see who's on there: Clem, Paul, Tim, Neil, Nico, Chris, Surav. More are coming before we leave Majuro for Dutch Harbour. More will join in Dutch Harbour until we reach our full capacity of twenty-two crew, including the two kids!

And so far everyone has been very nice to me, I mean they haven't thrown me overboard yet...

Calling Infinity a beauty isn't making her any justice. You can feel at home as soon as you step in the gallery, you can see all around you the evidence of a family, a close-knit crew and a community living here. Let's take a tour!

Infinity

The pirate cook

Aft deck

The galley

You can also see the obvious: a set of new sails piled in the middle of the gallery, a number of boxes of spare plywood, odd fittings, trash, rags, pipes, oil filters, hoses, rubbers, cables, and more crap still. The front deck is a pile of buoys, ropes, odd pieces of sails and various fittings. Everyone has something to do: sewing the new sails, cooking, cleaning and re-concreting the bilges, fixing the insulation and the celing panels, tiling the anchor compartment, fixing a leak in the toilet floor. Let's not even start with the installation of the new engine trasnmission or installing an off-board engine mount (yep, a spare engine won't hurt if shit goes wrong in the Northwest Passage).

What do I get to do, practically? I got a crash course in plumbing by Clem and the internet and now here I am, in charge of reconnecting all the cabin radiators to the central heating through walls, panels and insulation. That's my pet project at the moment, but I'm sure the next one will be different! This wasn't an expectation as much as something I thought would happen when preparing Infinity for the Passage: upskilling myself in a lot of various activities like plumbing, painting, electrical work, panelling, tiling, etc.

For the rest, karaoke night - in the fourth least visited country on earth - was really fun (the worst interpretation of Aerosmith's "Don't want to miss a thing", morning freediving session doing forty meter lengths under the boat was amazing, cans of Budweiser are two dollars, life is really tough.

The best thing so far was assisting to the recording session by a local Aussi artist of several songs that will become the soundtrack of the next Sea Gypsies documentary: the energy in the room, the various song, all of them originals from Bob and written espacially for our voyage, the discussions between artists that have been living and breathing music their whole lives, was an experience I was grateful for!

Three weeks left in Majuro and more to come!!

Cheers,

Vicou the Sea Gypsy

PS: Did you check my awesome new logo, made by Elsa Secco? Exactly what I wanted, over a shitty Messenger connection. Some people just have it, thank you Elsa!!