I’ve always liked being at the shore. By shore, I mean the ocean. The salty breezes, the waves, they hold a certain charm for me. So, years ago when I was showing dogs, I agreed to go sailing with a friend of mine who also showed dogs. I had never been sailing. My boat trips up to this point had either been motor-powered or manually (oar) powered. While sailing wasn’t at the top of my must-do list, I thought it might be fun so when my friend asked if I’d like to go sailing on the Chesapeake Bay, I quickly accepted his invitation.
On a Sunday evening after the show I sent my dogs back to the kennel and I rode with my friend first to drop his dogs off and then on to a marina on the Chesapeake Bay where he’d rented a sailboat for a few days. By the time we arrived it was getting dark, so we lugged our “gear” to the boat and “stowed” it “below”. (Please note the use of some nautical-like terms. I thought they might add some sea-going flavor to this story.)
The first thing that struck me was the size of the boat, or, more precisely, its lack thereof. When my friend talked about sailing, I had visions of a vessel bigger and more seaworthy than, say, Tom Hanks’ raft in the movie Cast Away. This boat was small. The interior was just large enough for a cot on each side with a small amount of floor space left over. But, it was late and we were tired, so we tried to get some sleep.
It soon became obvious to me that I wasn’t going to get much sleep. It was mid-September and the weather was hot and humid. The weekend of shows had been hot and the air in the boat seemed to weigh a ton. So I tossed and turned all night and was glad when at about 6:00 AM we decided to get going. The weather that morning was much the same as it had been all weekend, hot and humid with nary a stirring of a breeze. So after neatly coiling ropes and stowing things away we motored from our slip and out to where the sea meets the sky.
The first thing I learned was “Right, Red, Return,” which has something to do with staying in your own lane or some such thing. (I tried searching for the term on the internet today and the only thing I could find was a punk rock band that goes by that name.) The next thing I learned was how boring motoring around the Chesapeake Bay could be. I’d previously had visions of the sails full of wind, sea spray in my face, a brisk breeze turning the waves to whitecaps. Ha! The weather was brutally hot and sticky, there wasn’t even a hint of a breeze and we had been without a shower since the previous morning. We were flying along at about 1 knot per hour, which is a nautical term for excruciatingly slow, too slow to get even a whisper of a breeze to cool us off. We just sat there watching the scenery crawl by and baking in the sun.
The day crawled by with never so much as a hint of a breeze. As the sun sank into the west, we found a little cove and decided to drop anchor for the night. We had a small camp stove with us and a cooler that had some hamburger in it. The weather had been so hot that the ice we had brought had melted completely. The hamburger looked a little like you would think hamburger that had floated in melted ice (water) for the better part of the day would. But, because that was all that there was to eat, eat it we did.
After we ate, we turned in for the night, partly because there was absolutely nothing else to do, and because we both had pretty good sunburns. We still hadn’t had a shower, but I didn’t feel like diving into water in the dark of night. So we tried to sleep, hoping the dawn would bring wind and a shower.
After a fitful night’s sleep, we awoke to more of the same. There was no wind, just more heat and humidity. The first thing I did was to dive overboard in an attempt to cool off and maybe feel a little less sticky. I was in the water about 15 seconds when a burning sensation enveloped my right leg. I crawled back on board and my friend quickly diagnosed the problem: a jellyfish sting.
As I lay there on the deck of the boat with my leg burning, my friend offered a cure for the pain. To me, the treatment sounded more like an old fisherman’s tale. I wasn’t going to agree to this, and I told him I’d rather cut my leg off. The cure, or more precisely the idea of the cure was, to me, far more unappealing than the pain of the jellyfish sting. I impolitely refused the treatment and suffered in silence.
While I was lying there, I had time to reflect on my little adventure thus far. I was sunburned, hot and sticky, sleep-deprived and had a jellyfish sting on my leg. I had learned nothing about sailing. I hadn’t even enjoyed one minute of the whole ordeal. I hoped that somehow we could scare up a little wind so that my trip wouldn’t prove a total bust.
Little did I know that I would soon get my wish.
To be continued…
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