Hola,

  I can only remember being seasick one other time in my life and that was in 1970, my first evening at Outward Bound.  We’d driven from Amherst, MA to Rockland, ME many hours, met the OB people who gave a brief orientation and then told us to sail to some island whose name I’ve forgotten.   Our sailboat was a 30 foot two masted pulling boat with a funny shaped sail.  After forever when one of the group who actually knew how to sail got us to this particular island, we sat off the island in the surf trying to guess what we were supposed to do.  While just sitting there rolling gently around I got seasick.  I attributed it to having eaten nothing since about noon and it was then late in the evening.  One of my OB group offered to help me off the boat but managed to snag his foot on something which landed us both in the water.  I crawled my way to shore.  Thankfully that was the only time during my 26 days of Outward Bound that I was sick.  Other folks were sick every day. Other folks probably learned to sail, I just tried to get through everyday which, for someone who’d never been sailing, rock climbing or repelling, or even really camping was like a series of final exams for which I was ill prepared.  I still don’t know how to sail or much else to do with boats.  I’m just not a boat person.  Things don’t make sense to me that instantly make sense to other people.  And the only thing I know about machines, and that’s what a boat is, a machine,  is that they will stop working at the worse possible times.    If you can’t fix them, or fix them enough, you’re done fore.  Thankfully Randal can fix them or fix them enough so we’ve been okay.  This last passage had too long a list of things not working.  And to top it all off and return to the point of my Outward Bound story, I got seasick…twice.  Actually the second day was a “sick headache” that became much worse from the Ibuprofen, Sturgeron, anti- nausea pill  cocktail I took to make it go away after two hot showers didn’t work.  I think the first day’s bout was caused from too much acid in my stomach from the big bowl of cabbage salad followed by a frozen banana.  I’d been fine until I ate that and then, not good at all.  Randal wasn’t particularly sea sick the first day which was a blessing as he usually is the one to be sick.  During the second day both of us were sick and exhausted from the huge swells and winds, most having been not forecasted by two different weather models.  By the third day I was over being sea sick but that’s when DoraMac got ill.  Fuel filter issues and GPS issues.  The final straw, late afternoon day 4, was when the autopilot stopped working and we had to hand steer the boat.  I’m not great ever at hand steering, but in rolling seas!  Well I got better because I had to, but not by much.  So we stopped for a night in a lovely bay Camarinas which looked and smelled like Maine and was quiet and lovely.  That was last night.  Today was actually a very pleasant cruise with no winds, relatively flat seas, and great speed.  La Coruῆa is a really interesting city and we might have time to explore.  Lots of boat issues need to be resolved before we even think about crossing the Bay of Biscay which would only be 2 nights, but still; things need to working perfectly, at least when we start out. 

  I didn’t call this email, “passage from Hell” because I know I’ve used that before.  I hope I can call it the “final passage from Hell.”  And the thing is, seasoned cruisers probably would have thought it no big deal. But then, as I tell everyone, I might live on a boat, but I’m really not a cruiser.

Ru