The thrill of sailing rough seas

I suppose there’s always a first time, and looking back it was bound to happen. I scrambled off a sailing boat and took the coward’s way out after being bashed about by an angry Poseidon and a furious Aeolus. Actually it was the wife who couldn’t take it any more and I simply went along. Sixty years of being thrown around while giving the middle finger to Aeolus and Poseidon, and during the week of another disaster, my birthday, I threw in the towel and was driven to Coronis.

A deep barometric low caused high winds with gusts of 11 to 12 Beaufort. My captain is something of a history buff and compared the storm to the one that wiped out the Anglo-French fleet in Crimea back in 1854. The Brits and Frogs were there in cahoots with the Turks against the Russians, of course. The Brits lost 21 ships and the French 16. The Russians who suffered fewer lost ships cheered the destruction of their opponents’ fleet, and Tsar Nicholas thanked the storm in an Orthodox service. Nineteen days previously, on 25 October 1854, 600 brave horsemen charged the Russian guns and this time the Russkies did not need any help from mother nature; Raglan, Lucan, Cardigan and Nolan took care of that.

The good thing about sailing in hard seas is the discomfort of it, the one that separates the men from the girls, and the fact that when one is sailing one automatically acts like a man. One is polite, gracious, and always ready to take risks when a fellow sailor is in trouble. These traits are unnatural in today’s me-me-me world. Mind you, it’s thrilling when you’re getting smashed by the waves and can see the squall to windward and the bow is rising and rising and then it stands still for a mini-second and then plunges and while it’s plunging you think you’ll never come up again but then you do and it starts all over again.