The Sea Inside

cubby-hole, tug my hood over my head and curl up on the lumpy floor. It’s surprisingly comfortable. Lulled by the gentle rocking, I feel the water through the thin hull as it vibrates with the outboard motor. Here in the belly of the boat, a place reserved for dead fish and smelly nets, the knowledge of what might lie below makes my berth feel warm, womblike. It’s as though I were sleeping under the sea. I could easily spend the night here, covered by the omnipresent layer of salt, careless of what I might look like or how wet or dirty I might be.
    None of those things matter now; they all evaporate with our intent. That subtle scrape of sand was a momentous leaving; if we carried on from here, we’d have to sail for ten thousand miles before we made landfall again, in Antarctica. This ocean links the hottest part of the earth to the coldest; in between is a vast, living arena.
    My body, which had been bumping gently on the floor, rolls to a halt; Rasika has slowed the engine to a purr. Woken by the lack of motion, I slide myself out of my hole, sliding out into the light, eyes blinking. The sun has begun to break the horizon, scorching away the stars. But we have not stopped to admire the sunrise. Ahead, the surface has been broken by black shapes: the sharp fins and lithe, leaping bodies of spinner dolphin. Excitedly, I clamber to my feet.
    ‘Come on, my boys!’ I shout, as they swerve and swoop. They start to spin on cue, turning full circle in the air, showing off their sleek-striped flanks and pink-flushed bellies like salmon over a weir. Rasika starts up his engine and they’re off, racing in front of our bow as their kind do the world over, as if every dolphin were performing in a perpetual oceanic Olympics.
    This close, it’s easy to see how they earned their binomial,
Stenella longirostris
, ‘narrow long snout’. With every break of the surface their beaks poke up, prominent as broom handles, armed with dozens of sharp teeth – perfect for feeding on the fish they’re rounding up below us.

    Suddenly a group of common terns drop out of the sky, all angles as they dive into the same bait, whistling as if with the joy of having found such a fertile source of food. There’s a series of sharper splashes – the frenetic, jagged leap of yellowfin tuna, launching themselves out of the water in their ferocious pursuit. Spiky slivers of silver with big round eyes, they look like something out of a cartoon. This concentrated spectacle will be repeated a million times throughout this ocean on this calm morning.
    Then the phone rings. Rasika reaches down into a box and pulls out a 1980s-style desktop telephone, complete with push buttons and a cable trailing out the back. Drew and I look at each other in amazement; maybe the line runs all the way back to shore? Our boatman talks to a fellow fisherman, then, carefully replacing the receiver, revs the engine back into action. He navigates from a lifetime at sea, just as his fellow fishermen have come to determine the movements of their catch by the waxing and waning of the moon. Nineteenth-century whalers observed similar effects on sperm whales, which seemed to congregate around full and new moons. Such lunar assemblies may have more to do with feeding on squid, but the image of great whales guided by shafts of moonlight through blood-warm waters is too poetic to disavow. Buddhists believe any human spirit might be reborn as a bird or a fish, or a whale, or vice versa; that any animal can become another. In their cosmology, there is no God, no dominion, nor any distinction in the morality we apply to living things, since they are connected and interdependent, and capable of attaining enlightenment. And in a Buddhist culture where each full moon brings a national holiday, work and play are set to natural rhythms. Inshore at dawn, men fish from wooden stilts, perched like human herons in the surf. They put out to sea in vividly-painted boats balanced with outriggers, looking more like carnival floats. Their piratical crews dangle from the yardarms, decked out in outrageously bright sarongs as if trying to outdo one another on a Fourth of July parade. Even their nets are multicoloured – as if, under this tropical sun, nothing should be dull or monotone.
    The ocean is alive. Flocks of flying fish skitter like overgrown dragonflies, dozens at a time. As we pull alongside another fishing boat, its crew yank a great silver mass from the floor: a huge sailfish,