Love and Gratitude

Every hour of every day, someone onboard the RCS completes a boat check, where they ensure each of the ship’s critical systems are running smoothly. While doing the boat check, you spend lots of time amongst the humming and whirring machinery of the engine rooms. On the watermakers, the generators, the marine sewage device, and scribbled all about the engineering spaces, you can see someone has inscribed 3 simple words in black sharpie Love and Gratitude.

For the past four weeks I’ve been wondering about the story behind all of these notes. Why were they written all over the engineering spaces?

We should start by asking who the scribbler is. Obvious to anyone onboard, the scribbles belong to our beloved Nate Bears. Nate, a lifelong marine engineer and practitioner of mindfulness and martial arts, is the lifeblood of this vessel. Quite literally, he is the one that keeps the generators running, the refrigerator cool, and the poop pumping. I could write a whole blog about Nate, his self-made shoes, and his qigong lessons, but I want to focus on his mantra: Love and Gratitude.

Today I spent my watch as the assistant engineer, so Nate and the other engineer JP spent the morning teaching me about daily and weekly system checks, how to care for a big diesel engine, and how we can fix half of the world’s problems with 21^st-century toilets. After we finished the work for the morning, I was able to ask Nate the story behind Love and Gratitude. He explained that there were lots of reasons why it’s written all over. He says that giving the machines love and gratitude will make them run smoother and last longer. I know that every time I go into the forward machinery space, the notes remind me that love and gratitude should be at the center of my thoughts as I move throughout the day. No matter what your interpretation is, out here in the middle of the ocean, there is so much to love and so much to be grateful for.

I love the way Venus, Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn are aligned in the eastern sky before the crescent moon is chased above the horizon by the rising sun. I love laughing with my watchmates in the main salon at 0045 while cramming in midnight snacks in preparation for dawn watch. I loved lying on top of the jib and the JT on the bow sprit with my best friends in Palmyra, learning the constellations as they rotated through the clear equatorial sky.

I’m grateful for my mates and scientists, who have taught me so much about sail handling, celestial navigation, CTD deployments, and how to titrate for alkalinity in 10-foot waves. I’m so grateful for the amazing and unexpected friends that I have made on this insane journey. Most importantly, I’m grateful for my friends and family back home in Florida, who have supported my dreams of becoming an ocean scientist for all these years.

With Love and Gratitude,

-Mark Leone