The weeks passed. We saw no sign either of a ship or of drifting remains to show that there were other people in the world. The whole sea was ours, and, with all the gates of the horizon open, real peace and freedom were wafted down from the firmament itself.

It was as though the fresh salt tang in the air, and all the blue purity that surrounded us had washed and cleansed both body and soul. To us on the raft the great problems of civilized man appeared false and illusory--like perverted products of the human mind. Only the elements mattered. And the elements seemed to ignore the little raft. Or perhaps they accepted it as a natural object, which did not break the harmony of the sea but adapted itself to current and sea like bird and fish. Instead of being a fearsome enemy, flinging itself at us, the elements had become a reliable friend which steadily and surely helped us onward. While wind and waves pushed and propelled, the ocean current lay under us and pulled, straight toward our goal.

Thor Heyerdahl, from Kon-Tiki

Currents

One is inclined to select the events of this isolated atoll as epitomizing the year, for even here, on the remote edges of the Pacific, vast concerted shifts in the oceans and atmosphere had wrought dramatic change.

Elsewhere about the Pacific it also was common knowldge that the year had been one of extraordinary climatic events. Hawaii had its first recorded Typhoon; the seabird-killing El Niño visited the Peruvian coast; the ice went out of Point Barrow at the earliest time in history; and on the Pacific's western rim, the tropical rainy season lingered six weeks beyond its appointed term - Sette and Isaacs (1960).

El Niño

The big weather news of 1998 was certainly El Niño. Every major storm that hit the coasts of North America that year was explained away with two words--El Niño

Many a man ought to have a bath-tub larger than the boat which here rode upon the sea.These waves were most wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall, and each froth-top was a problem in small boat navigation...

A seat in this boat was not unlike a seat upon a bucking bronco, and by the same token, a bronco is not much smaller. The craft pranced and reared, and plunged like an animal. As each wave came, and she rose for it, she seemed like a horse making a fence outrageously high. The manner of her scramble over these walls of water is a mystic thing, and, moreover, at the top of them were ordinarily these problems in white water, the foam racing down from the summit of each wave, requiring a new leap and a leap from the air. Then, after scornfully bumping a crest, she would slide and race, and splash down a long incline and arrive bobbing and nodding in front of the next menace.

Stephen Crane from The Open Boat