by equus » Tue Oct 23, 2007 10:48 am
There is a fine line between sense of adventure and stupidity.
A friend of mine needed to get her 35' sailboat (not a catamaran though) from the Bahamas to Florida and needed some help. She got a couple that knew nothing about sailing and me...who knows nothing about sailing but have been around boats off and on my entire life. We all took shifts. We set sail just before dusk and before morning the engine was dead...but we sailed on. That night the generator died but the battery bank was full. The first morning we had about 12' seas and everybody on board except me was hurling (I'm lucky in that I don't get sea sick). We had a very stiff wind blowing in the opposite direction we wanted to go. We finally got to Florida and got a tow to the marina. All in all it was about 3 days...3 very, very, very long days. It can get very boring on a boat with no TV, computer, guitar, or whatever else gets you through the day (even when you're trying to repair a deisel engine...that you know virtually nothing about).
Oh yea...and the plane flight to the Bahamas was...interesting (it's one of the smaller, less populated islands). Imagine a little bitty plane landing on a landing strip that looks like the most repaired piece of asphalt on the planet...little bumps everywhere...not a smooth surface to be found.
But around the world...first time sailing? That seems beyond 'sense of adventure'.