At 15° N, 48°W this is about 3 hours after European midnight.

The full moon enlightens our smooth passage towards the west, but we have one thing in common, no fireworks will shatter the night sky above us.

Surely we will raise the glass to welcome another year, as we, no more than anyone else, wish this current insanity to take another exit. Therefore we have some Hungarian Palinka from Baloo (za prijatelja, to je Rogacica) and some Cava from Constantio for a gathering at local midnight. We are some of the few people who move at this moment I suppose, together with our companeros from the Gallant.
But what exit should we take? Back to normal, we are all praying for back to how it was! Evolution showed that this never has been the case, although the surface shine might recall some memories of recently or long gone social structures.
Here on the ship we are out of the bubble for a moment, social distancing does not exist and hygiene standards are the same as 10 years ago, just fine. So possibly, thoughts and senses are less constrained by the common panic, but widely open for imminent affairs of life at sea, the wind, food, the community.

Andrew, my good friend from England, once brought up the insight that now, as the UK exits the continental community, they have a chance to start over totally. Make all agriculture organic by law, until its back to normal. Produce food for the island first and make quality accessible for everyone, instead of boxing in the blind within the ring of the worldwide food mafia, having the only goal to keep the poor poor.
Every country could do this for sure! Why does Holland need to be the 2nd biggest food exporter in the world while nobody there knows how a real tomato tastes?

So what is back to normal then? Wreck a few cruise ships but in the same time build a new series of container ships of 400m for Amazon, Alibaba and this kind of shit! Restrict travels, pay test after test, while the internet carries you around the world at an ever faster pace, being already the second biggest consumer of energy worldwide.
I think it's the pace of life and the comfort provided to citizens which have to change, in the over-developed areas soonest! With the pace I mean the constant orders given by the referees and linesmen who control the rat race. What is the great purpose of these pacemakers? 8G, 10G, 100G? Who is following them up, we all? Will not masses of people, mostly rural, drop out and arrange their own community until just the people employed by these google companies keep following and in the end only the machine stays there? That would suck, says my feeling, so better provide an alternative which already goes in the other direction, the one of the slower, self-directed pace.

This goes hand in hand with the comfort we got used to. Comfort which constantly tries to convince us that it makes us happy and even happier, if we just got a little more of it. A pure, pure drug, just legal, affordable (for us;-) and accessible, but just as addictive and unhealthy for body and mind as all of them.
Looking into our wake I see that our pace increased much now. After a swim in the calm ocean this afternoon, now we already log 8 knots towards the west again, all sails set and in every free hand a banana. Pace made only by the wind, comfort, made only by the present company.

There are many more ways than ours to be happier with less comforts, anyway, people are not fishes, so ours is in some particular way also an escape, but that will hopefully not be the norm, that normal people have to escape from this maddening society. The planet is ours, just as much as from all the other creatures. So the only way, I guess, is sharing. Destruction and escape into the universe we should save for the books and movies, as for mad fantasy can warn and entertain us, but might have no place in our society.

Happy new year!

Andrew