Trailing Christopher Columbus and a total eclipse in the Atlantic

MÁLAGA, Spain — When I was 8 years old, I wanted to run away to sea and be a cabin boy on a clipper ship. Sixty years later — gender, age and vocation notwithstanding — I finally got the chance.

As I packed to meet the Star Flyer on the southern coast of Spain in October, my one worry was whether this modern clipper would live up to my childhood dreams.

Live up to? Oh, my. It trumped them all, starting at the moment I saw it.

The Flyer was tied up at a palm-shaded pier in Málaga — long, slim white hull; four tall masts gleaming in late-day sun; sails furled and waiting. I already knew the names of those sails: Before reality broke over my childhood, I’d managed to memorize them. Now, seeing the real thing — after so long — brought tears to my eyes.

We left the harbor that evening, bound for the Caribbean, and when the crew began unfurling those sails, I wept again, hoping my fellow passengers hadn’t noticed. But their eyes were trained upward too, and not all of them were dry.

In those first hours, I got what I had come for — the sight and sound of a wind-driven ship and the promise of three weeks at sea, much of it without the sight of land.

Most of the 150-some passengers had been hooked — less by the graceful ship, though everyone said it was a beautiful bonus — but by the trip’s other startling attraction: the rare chance to see a total eclipse of the sun over the open Atlantic, where the skies are among the least polluted on the planet.

Along the way, we would have twice-daily lectures on astronomy, archaeology, geology, wildlife, climate change and maritime history — subjects that were or had been full-time careers for most of the people listening.

Our course would cover about 3,400 nautical miles and not only intercept the path of the Nov. 3 eclipse but also follow the route Columbus took to the New World, pushed westward by the trade winds. The winds had been another part of my landlocked childhood; their name alone gave me chills.

I was on deck before sunup the first morning, when we were still in the Strait of Gibraltar. The famous Rock lay behind us — an unmistakable black triangle against a blue-black sky. Ahead, the lights of Tangier glittered from the coast of Morocco.

Those weren’t unfamiliar places. I’d been lucky enough to visit Tangier, and I once put out a taillight backing into the Rock of Gibraltar. But I had never imagined how they would look from the water, let alone in a waning night. The scene was otherworldly, like a stained-glass window or a dark mirage.

Our next port of call should have been the Portuguese islands of Madeira. But strong head winds were slowing us, despite use of the ship’s engines. Unless we skipped Madeira and turned south for the Canary Islands, Capt. Yuriy Slastenin said, we would miss the eclipse.

There wasn’t a murmur of protest. The eclipse chasers aboard would gladly have jumped into the Atlantic and pulled the ship themselves if that would get the Flyer to the solar rendezvous on time.

I have seen three total eclipses (four if I count the one my fearful parents wouldn’t let me watch when I was a child), but I was a novice, compared with my focused shipmates. Some had seen three times that many and a few were so dedicated that they were running out of room for notches on their telescopes.

This was the 19th eclipse for a diminutive astronomer from California. “I’ve told my children,” she said, “when I go, cremate me and scatter my ashes during the next eclipse — during totality.”

Without Madeira, we sailed for four days before reaching the Canaries, over water so intensely blue that the ocean looked like a basin of cobalt paint, just begging for an artist’s brush.

In the Canaries’ busy harbor of Las Palmas, we shared a wharf with a shockingly big modern cruise ship — the kind with 2,000 or 3,000 passengers and a dozen decks. Illuminated at night, it was a floating city. Next door, the Star Flyer was out of scale. With its low profile, lace-like rigging and single string of white lights linking the tops of its masts, it looked delicate, more spider web than ship.

A small spider’s web, at that. The Flyer’s steel hull measures 360 feet, less than a third of the behemoth hulking beside her. But Columbus’ ships had been even smaller: The Niña, the Pinta and the Santa María all put together weren’t as long as our modern clipper.

Beyond the Canaries, the empty blue seascape resumed. Except for a distant freighter early on, we saw no other ships — just occasional porpoises racing beside the hull and spates of flying fish that darted out of our way, zipping from wave crest to wave crest for 50, 100, even 200 feet, like handfuls of expertly skipped silver stones. The air grew warmer by the hour.

We could make 7 to 8 knots an hour with the trade winds and sails alone. But without landmarks, this felt less like forward progress and more like rocking in the center of a vast blue pond — a big azure disk a dozen miles across, as wide as the horizon in all directions, with a white ruffle of clouds fringing the distant edges.

Even when the water looked as calm as a sunny lake, the swells were big enough to make the ship pitch and roll, lift and lurch and drop, over and over and over. At its mildest, this was the rhythm of a human pulse or maybe a lullaby. At its strongest, the teeth-gritting motion of the ship could throw you off your feet. Some passengers got seasick; I got bruises from being tossed against door frames and railings.

All the while the ocean looked, well, flat. No wonder people once had trouble believing the world was round. I would have too.

But explorers themselves knew better, maritime historian Bill Coger said in a lecture. The ancient Greeks had already figured out that the Earth was a sphere, he said, so Columbus sailing west to reach the East didn’t mean sailing off the edge of the world; it just made logical sense.

The daily lectures were full of surprises like that. And this: “How many of you have seen the Milky Way?” astronomer Tyler Nordgren asked in his first talk. All hands went up, mine included. “You’re unusual,” Nordgren said. Because of light pollution, “Sixty percent of people living in the United States and Europe have never seen it.”

I felt smug: I might not have seen a clipper ship as a kid, but I’d sure seen that pale blur above my family’s northwoods cabin. Plenty of times.

Then Nordgren gave a nighttime lecture on the open deck, and I found out I was wrong.

The ship’s lights had been dimmed, and sky watchers sprawled in deck chairs while Nordgren pointed out significant stars and constellations, as sharp as sequins overhead. I was stunned by how much there was to see. What I remembered wasn’t this Milky Way. Against the clean black sky, this one blazed like an incandescent river.

Another surprise arrived by air four days after we left the Canaries: a gray rock pigeon that took refuge on the top deck, the only place to land within several hundred miles. It was a bird you’d find annoying on a city sidewalk, but the lost creature became an instant mascot. Passengers set out food and water, named it (Priscilla, last I heard), and worried that it might try to keep flying and would surely drown. It wisely stayed with us the rest of the voyage.

As the Nov. 3 eclipse approached, anticipation rose, and I was drawn into the growing excitement. And the accompanying worry.

Seeing a total eclipse requires pinpoint precision and a lot of luck. You must be in the right place, with the right weather, at exactly the right time — none of which could be guaranteed. And there’s no wiggle room: This time, the sun would be totally blacked out for — at most — 49 seconds.

Lectures now focused on eclipse photography: Use these lenses, set these shutter speeds, choose where you’ll stand, don’t get in other people’s way and (no kidding) turn off your automatic flash.

The advice I took most to heart came from former Shuttle astronaut Loren Acton, who lectured on his stint as a payload specialist on Spacelab 2: Don’t waste time fooling with your camera, he said. “Just look at it! It’s gorgeous!”

Capt. Slastenin nailed the location just before dawn on eclipse morning, turned the ship into the strong winds from the east and held it there with the engines, parking us at 17 degrees north latitude and 37 degrees, 11 minutes, 56 seconds west longitude.

It had rained hard in the night, and the sky was overcast. For the next four hours, the clouds parted a little, closed again, thinned enough to tease but not enough to see clearly.

“All we need is one minute,” one of the astronomers grumbled.

It sounded like a prayer. And then it was answered.

In the distance, bright patches began to appear on the water. The captain gunned it and steered for the sunlight. I remember reaching it as if we screeched to a stop. We had only minutes to spare.

Everybody slapped on dark eclipse glasses and stared in the same direction, like the audience at a 3-D movie. Somebody yelled out the four stages of the eclipse as if they were football plays.

“First contact!” — the first dark bite the moon takes out of the sun’s disk.

“Diamond ring!” — the flare of light from one thin edge, just before…

“Totality!!!”

The sun was instantly a black spot, as sharp as a bullet hole in the roof of heaven. The world went dark, and the deck exploded in cheers, shouts, woo-hoos and clicking shutters.

Within moments, the second diamond ring flashed, and the sun was back, looking as dangerously bright as ever to the naked eye, but the eclipse wasn’t technically over. If you put your eclipse glasses back on, you could still see the moon’s shadow taking its last black bite of the sun as it moved past. Then the clouds snapped shut again.

But by then, nobody cared. People hugged, couples kissed, guys pounded each other on the back, stewards handed out flutes of Champagne and everybody toasted the captain, who toasted us right back.

The eclipse was the pivot point of the voyage, so important that I kept thinking of it not as an event but as an actual place. Before the eclipse, people complained because they couldn’t get Internet; cellphones didn’t work correctly; they couldn’t get email. After the eclipse, all that didn’t matter much. People relaxed. I did too.

There was peace in the sameness of the days: the shifting light, clouds over the sea, bursts of flying fish, more lectures to absorb, more good conversations to have over more good meals, and no responsibilities. I could understand why old-time sailors on tall ships had trouble being “home” after a long time at sea. Dry land is much more complicated.

The last day before Barbados, where the voyage would end, I was standing at the rail with a guy from Colorado, gazing at the sparkling blue water and talking about writing in our journals. Mine, I said, was sounding awfully repetitive.

His, too, he said, but for a good reason: “What do you do when the only thing you can say is ‘contentment’?”

I smiled. I knew exactly what he meant. By then, I could have kept sailing, on that elegant ship, over that blue water, under those white sails, forever. The 8-year-old kid I used to be had the right idea.

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