I was born and raised on the Canadian prairie. When I first met John—a very experienced offshore sailor—late in 1996, my only sailing experience had been as ballast on a day trip in Australia.
But when he wanted someone to help sail Morgan’s Cloud, his McCurdy Rhodes Custom 56, from Bermuda to Maine in the early spring of 1997, none of his sailing friends, knowing what early spring conditions are like on this passage, would accompany him, so he had resigned himself to a tiring single-handed trip until I volunteered to go along.
When we left Bermuda early that May, I had absolutely no idea what to expect. Would I get seasick? Would I panic when I could no longer see land? What would it be like to be away from other people for almost a week?
Excellent advice. We just bought our first boat, a CAL 25 MkII. While we’ve crewed on other people’s boats enough to know we love sailing, I’d say we know next to nothing at this point. So we plan to take courses and hire qualified sailing instructors to teach us on our boat. We’ll stay in familiar waters until we learn what we need to venture farther. One step a time, and one day a bigger boat…
My mother learned to sail, as I did, when she married my stepfather after the death of my dad. Track forward 10 years and they were two handed mid Atlantic when he passed out on the floor of the cabin and was non responsive for 20 minutes. Later I asked her what was the main thing going through her mind in this time and she responded that she was trying to work out how she was going to get his corpse out of the cabin and over the side. They were two weeks from the nearest landfall.
I don’t think she was particularly troubled about making land on her own. Harry hadn’t taught her to navigate but they had Mary Blewitt’s Celestial Navigation for Yachtsmen and all the requisite tables onboard, she’d studied for a science degree at Bedford College London during the Blitz of 1944, had survived the Doodlebugs, kicked German incendiaries off the roof of her college and her dad had gone round the Horn three times, both ways, as an apprentice under sail before WW1. Totally ordinary, nothing special, she would have said.
Hi Mark,
That story resonates since my mother also went through the Blitz and dealt with incendiaries and was actually a V1 spotter sitting on the roof of a factory with a red alarm button to press if one ran out of fuel too close. That generation had very different, and probably healthier, attitudes to difficulty than we do.