I Was Drugged!

A very vivid memory from our mostly sleepless passage was during one of my watches when I hooked onto the jackline while I clambered into the cockpit to do my check.  I was standing on the companionway step as I watched the boat stern swing and sway back and forth and up and down and level out and start the whole series of moves over again.  To port, the sky and sea kept changing places with the stars looking like fireworks, they were so bright and not only did I see Orion's belt, I saw all of Orion.  And instead of my usual abject fear, I could only think how cool it all was, kind of psychedelic.  Groovy, man!

Going out into the ocean is a real challenge for me; I've done a few ocean sails from Miami or Fort Lauderdale to the Bahamas before and those made me so anxious.  I never got sick as I seem to have a stomach of iron, but I was not liking it in the least.  Knowing that we had an ocean run ahead of us, I was feeling anxious again, but we were proactive and all took a tab of Bonine to alleviate any possible seasickness, and little did I know as I did not read the packaging beforehand, there seemed to be an anti-anxiety part to the pill puzzle.

Since cooking underway is nearly impossible for me, I put together a big batch of chicken soup and stowed it in this amazing Thermos pot to finish cooking and keep warm during the whole passage.

I hate nighttime sailing, as I've mentioned a few hundred thousand times, so I was pleasantly surprised to not find my stomach in knots for this whole sail.  It was 30-plus hours of sailing.  We took shifts for lookout, which entailed one of us keeping a stopwatch and every twenty minutes, we would go into the cockpit, do a visual check for sightings of boat lights or large objects coming straight for us.  We were on two-hour intervals, so sleep was not easy to come by; seems your head was just nodding and the beeper went off and you had to get yourself and all those layers of clothing and foul weather gear up to the cockpit to check for lights, make sure we were on the right heading, and, obviously, lookout for large floating objects.

Every time I went up, after I hooked myself to the boat, I would think how amazing the sea is and how amazing our boat is to be able to just keep on going on sail power alone.  It really is awe-inspiring.  But I can share this with you now, I've done that and I'm fine if we never do another ocean passage, but you know that's not going to happen, right?