The Boat Trip from Hell (tm) [1,400 words, ~3 pages]

For whatever reason (possibly related to alternating poised command with startling idiocy), I've been asked a lot lately, "How long have you been sailing?" (That's almost as hard to answer as, "Where are you from?")

The answer is somewhere between 21 years and 3.

We sailed occasionally in Egypt, although it was usually someone else doing the work. We left in 1981. In the 1980s, I took a course to qualify as an emergency medical technician. (This comes back into the story, believe me.)

In my early 20s, I lived in the woodsy, hilly heaven of western Massachusetts. At college, I met a lifelong sailor in her late 30s who wanted to take her boat and prematurely arthritic spine to the Virgin Islands. She decided to hire and train women, who, at the time, were heavily discriminated against in sailing, so female crew were hard to come by.

It turned out that she was a terrible teacher, was wonderful to the boat but irresponsible to the crew, was seriously undertreated for significant mental illnesses, and was horribly addicted to narcotics. I was headed to nursing school in the fall, so I had a terrific opportunity to figure out exactly what her diagnoses were after the fact.

One of the crewmembers was epileptic and couldn't swim, one of them was surly and wouldn't think, and the Captain -- in her skipperly wisdom -- decided to let the first mate (me) handle their training because I had been out on the water before. Her notion of teaching was to say to me, "Read this chapter in the book tonight. Explain it to the others in the morning." Then, the next day, she would steer us out into the open water then say to us, "I'm going below. Turn us around and get us back in. I'm not here." Then she would turn and give me a Look, which meant that:

a. If anything happened, I would pay dearly.
b. If we needed help, she would help, but then I would pay dearly.

She also made me medical officer, because I had that EMT training. She stocked the medicine chest with what would now be a few thousand dollars' worth of suture materials and medications (mostly narcotics and downers, of course), told me I was responsible for it, then told me not to worry about it because, "If we need any, I'll tell you what you need to know." Great.

I was young. I wanted the adventure. Once I was in, it didn't occur to me to back out.

We were 14 days at sea, learning to sail on the "straight shot" from Cape Cod to the Virgin Islands, following a course outside the Bahamas. I was on the 12 to 4 watch; by the second week, I was hallucinating in the wee hours. I told the Captain once, and she told me I'd better stop hallucinating because that was dangerous and she was not going to reassign the watches, so I'd better learn to deal with it.

When she wasn't scolding me, she was hitting on me, which just goes to show that being an asshole is an equal-opportunity characteristic. Two highlights: her repeated efforts to phrase it as medical care and therefore part of my responsibilities, and the one time she threatened to court-martial me for not putting out. For once, the entire crew spoke up on my side, tho' very politely; otherwise, they kept their heads down and their mouths shut when the Captain acted out on me. This was in the '80s, when educated young women were more afraid of authority than they are now. It was appalling.

10 days out, the nicest person aboard developed a hemorrhaging peptic ulcer. We had to medevac her because we were over three days from land. The U.S. Navy sent out a jet with a box of supplies, but it took them 20 minutes of high-speed flying to find us because the Captain's sextant readings were so bad we were well over the horizon from our expected course! I started my first IV with a steel needle in collapsed veins on a 35 foot cutter in blue water, and got it in on the second try. Somehow, that made me very confident about nursing school.

It took another day or so for the Coast Guard to get within striking distance, but they sent a helicopter out to get her as soon as they could. The Captain chucked her in the dinghy and took her out to the end of a 25' line so the helicopter could get near enough to scoop her up, and they took our little sweetie-pie away.

We didn't realize until the helicopter flew off that I had failed to tie a proper bowline to secure the dinghy to the boat. I can still see the Captain's face when she realized she would have to row all the way back. I thought eyes only shot fire like that in cartoons.

We dropped anchor in Tortola Bay 14 days, 11 hours, and 12 minutes after passing the lighthouse at Buzzards Bay. (But who's counting.) The Captain and I had a screaming match at one in the morning when I slugged an oak-paneled bulkhead in my exhaustion and rage. For hitting the boat I was kicked off onto a foreign shore -- after a brief call to wake up my father and ask him to arrange for my flight home -- with $5 in one pocket, a tube of toothpaste in the other, and my passport and diving gear still buried on the boat. She said I could come get my stuff later, but I was to forfeit my pay for the whole month's work and leave the boat immediately.

I woke up on a picnic table at Pusser's Landing, the toothpaste having exploded in my pocket and an old man having seated himself nearby, to wait for me to wake up, scold me for being a vagrant, and try to talk me into allowing myself to be kidnapped by him and his children to attend upon his shriveled little sausage until such time as he would tire of me.

Are you kidding? After what I had just been through?

Once we clarified what I would and would not put up with, and dispensed with his mean-spirited and empty threats, he indicated that the Pusser's Landing cook knew people who took in stray humans. The cook gave me an excellent lunch and a great deal of superior attitude, then called a friend of hers to take me over the mountain.

Marina and Samuel provided food, a guest room, showers, and not just courtesy but kindly friendship, until my dad could arrange for my escape on Monday. I tried to persuade them to accept some kind of recompense, but their attitude was "pay it forward"; they said to me, "We don't like how bad the world is, and we can't change it. But we can provide a safe place to people who need it, so we do." That's all they wanted. The fact that I was going into a helping profession was a huge bonus.

I've never had a lot of time for racial or economic prejudice, but since that stupid white kid from a Foreign Service family got rescued by such a good, classy, hard-working couple who would've been turned away from our cocktail parties with killing politeness, it seems completely infra dig.

Anyway, I came home to find that the cat sitter whom the Captain had hired had taken all the money but nearly killed my cat. She had never bothered to wonder why the cat had stopped eating sometime after adjusting to my absence, and somehow didn't notice that all the water was gone, the litter-box was overflowing, and there were maggots thriving in the kibble.

As far as I could tell, my cat had had no care for a week, and precious little before that. We both wept at finding each other again. Since then, I avoid leaving my pets for long, and never with strangers.

So, after this trip that nearly killed a crewman, me, and my furry little friend, I felt strangely repulsed by sailing. I thought I ought to be interested, but just wasn't.

20 years later, RSD made me unemployable and eliminated nearly all my recreational activities. I lost a lot of illusions and pretensions along with my functioning, so it wasn't a total loss, right? Anyway, I was getting a bit tired of the list of things I could no longer do. Right then, I stumbled across the Bay Area Association of Disabled Sailors, and found something that I actually could do -- with help. Moreover, with my own boat, I can bring the cat with me!

Afterword ...

Not long ago, Matey tried to grab and use a dock line that was looped over the stern pulpit, not under it. I still had the grill on the rail, so it was a loud and startling event. Once we got sorted out, he apologized profusely for making such an elementary mistake. I said, "No, no, it's not your fault, it's my fault. You're still learning. I'm the Captain, I was standing right there, and I should've checked it before you stepped off."

Once he realized I meant it (which took a minute or two), he just stood there for a moment. Then he announced, "I would follow you anywhere, Skipper." With no further fuss, he went straight back to work.

I thought that was a little puzzling (though very sweet), but retelling this story of my first bluewater trip changes my perspective a little. I clearly learned something, at least in terms of how not to treat your crew.