Not our finest hours

May 27, 2008
Mediterranean Sea
Coordinates
It isn’t often that you will hear me complain because it is extremely rare that I cannot find the silver lining to any situation. This was as close as it gets out of the nearly 3 years out thus far.
We were exhausted after all our travels through Egypt after not taking much time to rest. We thought the next 3 day passage to Karpathos, Greece would be the time to catch our breath. Not so. As we exited the Suez Canal, I Lisa, began to feel achy which I though was simply due to the late night, 3 crew soccer game that had ensued until the late hours the previous evening. But by the end of my first night watch I hurt from my eyelashes to my bone marrow. By the next morning I couldn’t get two feet from the bathroom. Conveniently for me, there is one always two feet away on a boat. By that next afternoon poor Bruce had joined me in my misery with the extra component of nausea. Egypt’s parting gift to us was some terribly nasty intestinal thing which we will just call evil.
That following evening we were hit by 25-35 knots of wind that we were try desperately hard to sail nearly directly into. Close hauled and trying to put a second reef in and pull in some head sail between our night shifts at 1am, we came to find that the bashing had loosened the cover for our storm sail and sent it long lost over board, the sail itself was now dragging half in the water and one sheet to the head sail was wrapped around the surf boards and out of it’s blocks, and the dinghy was coming loose. It was about this time that Bruce began vomiting. We got things in order and got him to bed, when we took a large wave over the bow, which found its way again under the dinghy and through the two hatches that were not shut tightly enough. We took in enough water to soak the bed, all of Bruce’s clothes and leave another ½ inch floating around our feet. Under any other circumstances this night would have been uncomfortable and certainly inconvenient but tolerable. This night it was all we could do to remain conscious. If we had the strength at this point we would have taken all the sails down and just floated for a while but we couldn’t move anymore. We lay there taking turns blinking at the radar and faithfully, God blessed us with not one single piece of shipping traffic to deal with for the next 24 hours. For awhile, I tried to keep us close hauled but the wind would shift, we would round up, loose steering and tack on our own. Finally I set our course off far enough that I didn’t care if we ended up in Cyprus or Turkey. With the morning came the sun, calm seas and little wind so we were able to motor directly at our destination and sleep the day away. The boys thankfully never contracted this evil bug and took to foraging for nuts and fruits on their own. Matthew even rallied to cook spaghetti for them with little direction. He did voice his concern when he realized just how serious things can be when both mom and dad are out of commission. It is easy to say that was our worst night ever but thankfully, silver lining here, it was only 36 hours, we are both back on track now and we have great faith in our crew.