The One Who Touches Soul and Water

When I sit in her, especially there at the voga, seat number one, I take a deep breath and gaze at the horizon. I lengthen my spine and root my feet into the canoe. As if I were slipping my fingers into gloves, I move my hands to awaken the extension of my arms through the paddle. Presence. I inhale deeply with my eyes closed and, at the captain’s call, I exhale and plant my paddle into the water. As if I were a human-fish, touching the waves firmly with wooden fins, I surrender to the collective flow of paddling, while the wind fills our sail with grace.

I feel as one.

With the canoe, and with the sea.

And with every human there, who also, with their wooden fins, paddles in great synchronicity.

Then I realized: it doesn't matter what vessel I'm on. What I truly want is to navigate.

What I need is to return to the sea. For when I'm out there, I feel lucid.The strength of humility’s true magnitude takes hold of me.

Each way of being at sea awakens something unique in me, something I wish every human could feel.

Mintaka, our first 11-meter boat, awakened a sense of home. Not only the ocean as an ancestral home, but a return to myself. To my human essence.

The tallships we came to sail in the following years, ranging from 25 to 40 meters, robust and adorned with massive sails, stirred in me a deep sense of community. The power of collective life, so essential in these times. A feeling even more intense when lived within the confined space of a boat.

But now I’ll tell you something: I had been hearing the call of the sea long before buying our first boat. It was that first time I sat in a Polynesian outrigger canoe, in January 2018, that I planted the seed of this dream, watered by saltwater.

It all began with a canoe.

Our new canoe, with her mere 7 meters and only four crew members, awakened in me a remembering, of some life in which canoes were like members of my family, and I lived surrounded by them. Maybe paddling through the islands of Polynesia or Hawai’i, navigating by the stars, reading the flight of birds and the subtle touch of the wind.

The canoe awakens my connection to the ancestral, wild, intuitive, and raw.

Paddling for the first time was my initiation into this life at sea.

From that moment on, we were never apart again. And I never stopped paddling.

As much as I know I’ll remain in service aboard large vessels, so that you and many others can join us on our expeditions, I also know I’ll keep paddling.

Because I want to keep remembering.

Because I want to deepen my connection with the sea, and with the nature of existence, in the simplicity that only the canoe offers.

Because I want to keep sailing close to the water, fully exposed to the elements, feeling the sun or the rain, the strong or gentle wind, and using my wooden fins as a rudder that gives direction to my vessel.

Pira Veve, our canoe, was born.

She was born to paddle, to sail, and to surf.

To guide us back to our origins, in reconnection with our ancestors.

To bring us close to our ego-less master: touching the water, touching the soul.

We named her Pira Veve, which in Tupi Guarani, a language trunk of many of the Indigenous peoples who broadly inhabited the Brazilian coast, means Flying Fish. The same name we had, curiously, received many years ago for our future boat.

With a mix of freshwater and saltwater, a symbol of where the canoe comes from and where she’s going, she was baptized. We prayed, gave thanks, and prepared ourselves for her first small crossing.

We flew and sailed to remember that as above, so below, and that sailing through the infinity of the sea is like flying high among the stars, or diving deep into the vastness of our inner ocean.

Pira Veve is small, but she is immense.

She is our portal to the great medicine the sea wants to offer, teaching values that the world, in these times of so much madness, needs to feel...

...so the mind may become more sane, and the soul more alive.

If you want to understand a bit more what I mean with this all, watch this video.

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Acknowledgments

A huge thank you to Cauê and Pp, the two amazing athletes who were with us aboard — teaching, guiding, and sharing their strength.And a special thanks to Cauê and Core Va'a, who built our canoe with so much love.