21. Ode to a Sailor's Wife, La Palma, the Universe, and Everything
- Feb 19
- 10 min read
La Palma, January 2026.
This article is about my wife, a non-sailor. And La Palma in January. And a private tour of an observatory. And the stars, the universe and everything.
The pull to the sea is an odd one.
It's often a solitary one. I think.
It's hard or impossible to deny this pull. Unless this, the sea, is idiosyncratic to me. Maybe other souls feel similar relentless pulls to mountains or deserts or pottery.
It's a different life from a land based life. Hard if you want family. Maybe all lives are hard if you want to follow a passion. But probably harder if you don't.
I waited a long time to meet the love of my life.
I got to 42 and faced the realisation and acceptance that the family and kid thing probably wouldn't happen for me. And as soon as I gave up on it, as soon as I surrendered, I met Olivia. I have found this to happen many times in my life. Small things, big things - you struggle, you effort, you try to manifest, you set goals, you make dream boards, you work and you effort and nothing happens.
And then you give up on it, hand it to God, and effortlessly it presents itself. So I have given up on the complicated new age stuff and instead I just ask God to support me.
My relationship with Olivia kind of went boom Boom BOOM - we met, got engaged, got married and got pregnant, in that order and very quickly. Just two years from meeting to the birth of our first son.
Which, perversely, has always given people I've spoken to hope. It's never too late.
A friend of mine, Mark, described camping with his wife Penny, just driving round Wales and parking up in a small kitted out van. And he said, "And Penny is the best thing in the world."
It was a throwaway line but true. That's how I feel about Olivia.
And she doesn't like sailing.
She never made a secret of it. And for twenty years it made no difference to us. I embraced proudly being the provider for my family and was delighted to be working full time and more to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. And Olivia was equally committed to being a full-time mother and nurturer. There wasn't much time for sailing.
But, as I outlined in https://www.svbeyond.com/post/sailing-into-sunset-retirement-into-late-life-adventure, eventually I could deny the call no longer. And now our marriage had to make room for a new thing. It's not exactly a ménage à trois but there are logistics involved.
In my old village I met a chap who late in life discovered a passion for long distance running that eventually culminated into a commitment to run the Marathon des Sables (MDS). It's recognised as the hardest footrace in the world - 250km over six days, over six consecutive days - in which the runners have to carry their food, water and equipment (https://marathondessables.com/en/).
Across the Sahara.
So, when the chap started his training, it involved building up the weekly miles to the point of eventually running a Marathon (42km). His family stood on the sidelines, cheering him on, and gave joy and recognition for his achievement. When he was building the miles, he said, for the MDS (six races longer than a marathon) every Sunday his training would be some 40km. A four hour Marathon every week.
"No one cheered any more," he said. Rather, it became a bit of a pain in the backside, the hours he had to train. For months if not years. Heaven help us but our Cody wants to do it.
There are two types of sailors, the ones that like to arrive in new places, and the ones that like the journey there. For me, the sailing thing is the joy of crossing oceans. Which places me pretty robustly in the second camp. And it takes time.
Something out of the old life has to give.
And the giving, really, is by the party who gets no joy from the sailing, i.e. my wife.
Olivia has been extraordinarily generous about the whole thing. Her position is, "Well, I have to support you. I love you so how could I not want you to have this. I think it comes from God anyway, so how could I have a view!?"
I would love Olivia to come sailing with me across the oceans of the world. And it ain't ever going to happen. She gets seasick and it's just not her thing. So we have arrived at a compromise: I sail and she joins me in ports around the world.
So far so good. We have done Baltimore, New York and Long Island, and in this blog she joins me in La Palma, the Canaries.
For the first few years of this Beyond project, it was pretty much me. Then my two boys joined, and now Olivia has joined the crew. Sort of.
In January 2026 the UK was suffering from some monumentally bad weather - endless grey skies and rain. La Palma, on the other hand had days of 20°C and in the evening it dropped down to say 12°C. Olivia joined me for a cheeky week of winter sun with no complaints.
We rented a car and did exploration every day. We have always liked road trips. You drive through a landscape and experience it. It's not as granular as walking but you cover more ground. And we love hanging out.
Normally we don't do excursions or organised tours but on this occasion we signed up for a star gazing thing with a chap called Angelo. This obviously happens after nightfall so we set off in good time to get up to Roque de los Muchachos, the highest point of the island where all the observatories are.
As we drive up the snaking road of hairpin bends, through coniferous forests, suddenly we are in mists (see clouds), the sun is setting and the temperature drops like a stone. We trustingly follow our GPS until we are totally lost.
Even though we are now at the highest point of the mountain landscape we are still in the clouds. We thought we would break through and get above the clouds. Eventually we get up to the very highest point, the actual peak of Roque de los Muchachos, which no doubt would present spectacular views on a cloudless day. I step out of the car and discover that the temperature has gone below freezing, the wind is howling and windchill factor is off the charts (see effing cold). I take exactly one video before I beat a hasty retreat back into the warm car:
We still haven't located exactly where we need to be for our star gazing thing. As we drive around it goes dark and ice on the mountain roads become an issue. Randomly, we end up in a carpark next to the looming dark shape of an observatory. They are big up close.
A door opens at the top of flight of metal stairs and in the square halo of light of the doorway, stands a man. It's all slightly surreal.
"What are you doing here!?" he shouts.
"I don't think you are Angelo!?" I shout back.
A confused exchange happens and we end up laughing in the biting wind.
"Well, you are here now. Would you like a private tour?"
So we end up with an exclusive tour of the Nordic Telescope.
Tapio is a delightful man who has been an astronomer for some 40 years. He comes from Finland and speaks very good English and has lived on La Palma for a long time. Married to an English lady from up north. When he speaks about his kids, he says "bairns". Nice chap.
He explained and demonstrated the observatory to us with great patience.. The building is actually a machine - the whole thing rotates; it has lenses and filters and a 2m diameter mirror, a large curved roof-sized shutter slides open; lots of hydraulics and cooling systems and it's just impressive. Since 1988 they have collected data, filtered it, applied algorithms, doppler shift stuff, red or blue or violet filters applied, electromagnetic variances calibrated, and I am just repeating words that I think I heard in his explanation. It was very inspirational the whole thing, not least the good fortune of us seeing it like we did.
Sailing across the Atlantic every night I would look at the stars and wonder. And here I was getting another view point. This one, powerful though it was (and generous by Tapio!) was odd because it struck me: it's like they never look at actual stars. They look at computer screens and electronic data. A second hand experience with massive filters in front of it. Makes me wonder if they still see the stars and the awe, mystery and majesty of it all. They probably do, even more than we do with their invested learning. I hope so.
Olivia and Tapio chatted about aliens but Tapio wouldn't be drawn about seeing UFOs though I could tell he was amused.
"The only aliens I have seen all week are you two."
I think he meant it in a friendly way. Unless it was an admission that he was of the Galactic Star Council.
With many thanks, we set off and finally find Angelo, the chap running the star gazing experience we have signed up for. In a lay by. Half a dozen shivering participants hovering around his big white telescope on the side of the road, shuffling forward and looking at actual stars in the firmament through glass lenses. Almost as interesting as our Nordic Telescope tour. His shtick is to flip between stars and clusters and tell a little story of each. His last one is pointing his telescope towards the furthest distance object our eyes can see, the Andromeda galaxy.
It's 2.5 million lightyears away. Or the distance that light moves over 2.5M years. Supposedly. Angelo is a lovely chap and very enthusiastic about what he does. I want to laugh but it's too cold and it would be rude. Convert that distance to nautical miles and you end up with 1,277,095,833,5180,505,000nm. According to an online search the correct way to say that would be twelve quintillion seven hundred seventy quadrillion nine hundred fifty-eight trillion three hundred thirty-five billion one hundred eighty million five hundred five thousand. It's kind of a bit ludicrous. I don't know much about astronomy but I have some understanding about perspective.
Just to help me think about it... Consider the size and scale of the sun, as we see it. If it was a beach ball, say it would be maybe 90 feet away. Keeping this scale, the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, at 4.3 light years away would convert to 4,500 miles away. My Atlantic crossing was sort of 3,000 nm. Add 1,500nm as the crow flies west, would take you to El Paso, Texas. I visualise the beachball.
Visualise harder. It's a beachball. I know is shining with the light of a sun but I still can't understand how I could see it.
Now, to carry on this analogy, let's call Andromeda a beachball and its supposed converted distance would be 26 trillion miles away, or 4.42 light years. It's basically a similar distance to Proxima Centauri. So I place my beachball Andromeda next to Proxima Centauri. There.
I am squinting now.
It's a nonsense that my human eye has enough resolution to see it. I know it's a light, not actually a spatially resolved ball, but even then, my optics would give up long before light has travelled for year or two (see sarcasm).
There is something wrong with the model presented to us. I have questions.
Anyway, back to Olivia. While I am pondering the actual distance of stars and what they are, she approaches things in a different way. If you look at the pics above, you can see in her face that she just has fun. She is intuitive and wise, cares about broken things, loves things with a fierce wisdom, and makes everything fun.
Her father, in his speech at our wedding, said, "Olivia's best qualities are probably her zany nature and fierce loyalty." He wasn't wrong. And she is the best with our boys. At home, I sometimes hide out of sight just for the sheer pleasure of hearing her banter with our boys.
I am very lucky to have her. I have always felt that God gave her to me.
But I feel that about a lot of things. People have been tricked into nihilism. Nothing means anything. We are, supposedly, on a small rock in the middle of a sea of eternity. Chemical processes run amok carrying DNA forward, for no particular reason, from one generation to the next. And in that worldview there is nothing special about anything. La Palma is just the tip of a volcano, a meaningless geological process, poking out of the Atlantic. Rock and sand creating moonscapes of black lava scars, and dust and sand aggregating into dark beaches. Which I will write about in the next blog post.
But and yet people, including Olivia and I, are moved by this island. It's called Isla Bonita - the beautiful island - and my question is why would people bother? Why do we name things? Why do we see the beauty? Why do we feel the awe when we look at stars? Why the sense of majesty and mystery? Why the gratitude? Why love?
It's to do with God. It has to be.
We went to a delightful small restaurant perched overlooking the village Las Indias and the blue Atlantic - El Quinto Pino - run by a delightful young couple (elquintopinolapalma.es). Six or seven tables, views to die for, quirky, colourful, lowkey, charming decor, and some of the best food we had ever eaten. And it was just the desire of these two people to make something beautiful and inspirational. They try hard, work hard, imagine and visualise, dream, just to create something special. It's a desire in their hearts to do something, not to hold meaninglessness at bay but to celebrate and (even if they might not have faith) give praise. And there is stuff like that everywhere. Once you start looking for it.
La Palma is elemental: earth, wind, water and fire. And beauty and awesomeness.
A bit like my Olivia.
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