Watching the sunset, standing under the blazing stars, feeling the wind on my face both day and night, had been a given. Now, here I was, in a grey city with a great cappuccino. A 24-year-old, with party invites to celebrate the end of university, friends to see, exams to take, and yet this terrestrial life felt insubstantial. I wrote the essays, went to the parties, celebrated with my friends, drank the rum, but part of me still felt at sea.
I was back on shore for so little time, I didn’t manage to adjust. The days raced straight away, with her large blue hull, sturdy build, the observation platform on her aft deck, her tall mast. This time there was no scientific work to do; we were here to host the film crew and Dr Gero for . I was looking forward to seeing a part of the creative process, how they would tell stories about the whales and the environment which is so familiar to me. I sent a message to say I had arrived and sat on the wall to wait for a ride out in the dinghy […] I soon found myself back on deck, alone on a solo watch. There were only three of us on board, and we were moving the boat between islands, where the rest of the crew would join us. While sailing past the volcanic island of Pico, the seabed stretching up into the sky, I took a minute to breathe in my reality. Here I was on a boat, in the Azores, with a flat sea and a soft setting sun. I had done it: I had just finished my degree. Although I hadn’t actually graduated yet, I felt sure I had passed. I found myself reminiscing about the last survey days in , in the gully off Nova Scotia, with the northern bottlenose whales, when university was ahead of me. I had been worried that I wouldn’t relate to people, that I wouldn’t fit in, that I wouldn’t be smart enough, that passion wasn’t enough, that I would be found out for not being a real scientist. My fears had proved to be so far from the real challenges I had ended up facing. Now it was over, I was sailing out the other side, and the world seemed to be wide open in front of me. I took my musings to my bunk as I was relieved from my watch, until some time just before dawn.
