Position: 18 degrees 45 minutes north; 153 degrees, 40 minutes west 125 nm day

288,342. That is roughly the number of waves that have passed beneath Charisma these past five sailing weeks since leaving New Zealand.

Not one the same.

Some have been little – like right now – maybe three or four feet high, suggesting that weather ahead is going to stay calm. We can look forward to another warm, smooth day. Others have been the size of an apartment building, looming gigantic and sometimes menacingly out of the dark night. The only way you know it’s coming is suddenly the stars behind you disappear, you hear the huge mass of water build, and Charisma tips forward (sometimes alarmingly so) just as you slide down the mountain. Above you now, sharp white teeth of the breaking wave-top glistens in the starlight.

The waves match, or perhaps make, the mood of the day. On a cloudy day the waves are a melancholy grey. Waves at sunset sometimes flash the colors of the rainbow as they challenge the twilight sky as to which can be more beautiful.

And the sound. It’s always there so sometimes you stop consciously noticing it. But it’s never far and it ranges from the storm force deafening roar of a huge black iron steam locomotive hissing and shrieking away, a cacophony of grindiing metal bearing down on you to the gentle sound of smaller waves as delicate as the trickling of a mountain stream.

My favorite wave appears on the 20 knot wind, cloudless sky day. That wave embodies the perfection of the color we might call “blue”. This wave’s blue is unmatched in beauty anywhere else in nature. It’s a blue made powerful as it channels tens of thousands of feet from the depths of the ocean, yet at the same time so fragile its crests shatter with the wind into shimmering perfection of exquisitely transparent crystal droplets.

I never get tired of watching the waves.