Man Overboard

MAN OVERBOARD!!
Go there in your imagination, and it sweeps you away. You imagine it happening while you're on the foredeck in heavy weather helping to take down the jib. Your harness isn't fastened right, a steep wave comes aboard green, knocks you down, and the next thing you know, you are in the water. By the time you come up, the boat is out of reach. If you aren't coughing you yell as if it is your last. The crew activates emergency measures to get the boat turned around to pick you back up, but you know all the things that can go wrong. Your personal flotation harness inflates as it should when it hits the water. You knock off your shoes or boots so you can swim. You swim for the man-overboard drogue that a crewmember has deployed. Its high flag and strobe calm you. You know you are much more visible than you were without it. Now you find Psyche with your eyes. By this time, she is surprisingly far away. The spinnaker halyard appears to have been fouled, and the crew is struggling to get the flogging spinnaker down. You only see these friends for the short moments you and Psyche are on top of waves. Most of the time, the waves hide all but the mast.

Although I have never fallen overboard from a moving vessel, I have jumped overboard to fetch a dropped bucket. This is a different story for another time; but suffice to say I know what it feels like to have that eye contact with your life support broken. It feels very lonely. Very scary.

Not as scary, I imagine as if you lose contact with the entire boat. That would be oh-so-awful. It is difficult to even think of that feeling, but it is like a car wreck on the freeway, you just have to look. Feel the adrenaline. The spinnaker doesn't come down, the engine won't start, or the propeller fouls on a line and stops spinning, killing the engine. The crew tries to tack back to the GPS position that was dutifully "marked" by a conscientious crew member, but the stuck flogging spinnaker is too much for the main; Psyche can't scratch back upwind against the 20 foot breaking seas. Your friends can't see you, and they don't know how far you've drifted from that position. It might take an hour or more to get back to that GPS, if the snafu is really bad. You aren't there, of course, so they slowly go down wind from that position, hoping to find you.

You have only seen the first part of this foiled rescue attempt. You try to keep your eyes on the sail, but soon, you only see it now and then. If you are in the coastal waters, you start trying to conserve heat. If you are in tropical waters, you start worrying about sharks. If it is night, you just worry. If it is day, you worry AND look. I figure the only thing worse than being eaten by a shark is being eaten by one you don't see. I've always fantasized about punching an attacking shark in the nose; I guarantee that I don't want to be eaten without at least trying it.

Sitting in bed staring at the ceiling, thinking about how scary the ocean can be. It's a little like a haunted house on Halloween. Kind of scary, but also somehow invigorating. More about sharks next time.

(p.s., my daughter and best blog-coach suggests I shorten my blogs and publish them more often.). I am taking her advice.