gwax's rumblings

Today was a hor­ri­ble day for me; it started out good and then just went down­hill real fast come about 5p. The details of why it was a bad day are unim­por­tant as I got a great story out of it but suf­fi­cie it to say, today was REALLY BAD. Just to pre­curse things, I joined the MIT sail­ing team just a lit­tle while ago.

So, I was out sail­ing FJs with the team. I started out as crew but then my skip­per had to switch to another boat in order to prac­tice for a regatta this week­end with her part­ner for this week­end. When my skip­per switched to another boat, I took over as skip­per of my boat and another per­son was switched over to be my crew. My new crew­man wasn’t ter­ri­bly expe­ri­enced and I’m not very good at rac­ing, but such things hap­pen. Anyway, we were prac­tic­ing (or rather learn­ing how to do) roll tacks, which are like nor­mal tack­ing except that you roll the boat a whole bunch and then straighten it out. Roll tacks are good because you turn faster and accel­er­ate out of them but they’re a lit­tle com­pli­cated and a lit­tle risky. Now, if you’re doing a roll tack and you keep the jib in really tight on the wrong side, it will shove your boat right over; this is, inci­den­tally, what my crew­man did.

It’s odd the things that you can per­ceive some­times, for instance, I manged to be acutely aware of the point where just right­ing the boat became futile, almost in the same man­ner you can catch your­self when you start to fall over. In this split sec­ond, it occured to me that, since I was dressed in khaki and white as I often am, I really didn’t want to go in the Charles (no amount of Goretex pants is going to keep you dry in the water). Not want­ing to get soaked, I hauled my ass right over the side of the damned boat. So I got up on that cen­ter­board, grabbed the side of the boat and started pulling to get it back upright. Incidentally, hav­ing gone over the boat, I was com­pletely dry save for the cuffs of my pants. Sadly, I couldn’t right the FJ on my own and it pro­ceeded to turtle.

I want you to take a moment now to pic­ture what it must have looked like; there’s an upside­down boat in the mid­dle of the Charles, one guy swim­ming next to the boat and another guy stand­ing on top of the boat, dry, wear­ing a button-down shirt under his life jacket. Then I got back to try­ing to right that boat and just tired the Hell out of myself so, one of the coaches offered to help from his motor­boat and we started get­ting the thing back up. The boat’s just about righted and I’m still hang­ing from the side, dry save for my ankles. It comes the time when I can climb over the side as the boat comes round and have sur­vived a cap­size with­out going in the water. Then my foot slipped. Luckily I was close enough that I could start pulling myself up and I only fell in the Charles to the mid­dle of my torso. My head, shoul­ders, upper chest and right arm didn’t touch the Charles.

So there’s two morals to this story: one, your crew can put you in the river and two, if you climb over the boat you can stay dry dur­ing a cap­size as long as you don’t slip.