Written from the Heart

This was a tough passage. Not because of the weather or the conditions, although they were far from fantastic but I have been through worse. This one was hard mentally. I collapsed in a total state. I was petrified, unnecessarily so. I was unable to keep things in perspective or draw from previous experience. The panic & fear may have been understandable if I had never been at sea before. A four day passage in my second year of cruising on Barraveigh that caused me to take such a nose dive has left me racking my brains & reflecting on what may have caused it.
I had been keen to leave Vanuatu & had been restless whilst we waited out bad weather looking for a good window to leave. Within the first 24 hours my melt down began, lying on the cockpit floor in floods of tears. A fear of the sea & scared that it was going to kill me had suddenly risen from inside. I have no idea where this suddenly sprung from & I know its from there that things got worse. Reflecting on it from the safety of an anchorage I wonder, have I suddenly hit a new stage in the grieving process & thoughts of loosing Sally, or is this more to do with the psychology of being at sea? Or is it just a bad mixture of everything? Which ever it is, it's serious & I need to overcome it. I made life dangerous for both myself & Bobby.

This life is not an easy one. There are many pleasures but a fair amount of hardships too. We are earning our adventures. Behaviours that never get a second thought in normal land life become huge issues on a boat at sea. It is those areas that I am trying to analyse to see what caused me to “system overload” & if they can be avoided in future passages.
If I'm totally honest I am so very very tried of the knocks & picking myself up again. I think I just ran out of energy to hold it together. I need a break. This isn't a lifestyle that is natural to me. I do it & may take it in my stride more than others but I too have my limits. I plan to give myself a day or two in a hotel to give myself the time & space to pull myself together. I have learnt two things about myself which do not blend well with life on board a boat; personal space & social isolation.
My personal space is a huge deal. At sea with the boat healed over there is little space on the boat to move about & with only one person able to be in the cockpit we were living in the cabin or on watch in the cockpit. I need to be able to walk around, get off the boat, spend time on land......I need space! But I need to find a way to deal with the lack of it while we are at sea. I'm also not good with social isolation. On passages with only my own company day after day, night after night, I begin to crave someone to talk to, play cards with, or just generally hang out with. Whilst at sea, Bobby & I continually take turns sleeping, or have time in the cabin away from the wet cockpit. This sends me a little potty as I think of family & home. Bobby on the other hand loves the alone time! I need people around me. Admittedly a cruisers lifestyle is very social, a good anchorage with loads of your friends around will be non stop sun downers, but that's only half the time, the rest is at sea & it is very isolated.

We made an emergency stop at Kirakira on Makira Island (south of the capital Honiara if you are looking at a map) after 4 days at sea. We were at our limits & needed to stop. On top of which we had problems on board. We ripped our head sail on day one (sailing 400 miles in three days with only a small main, shows you sailors out there how strong the winds were!). The head (toilet) overflowed, I shall let your imaginations run on that one, but just picture trying to deal with a horrible job at the best of times & especially horrible at a 45 degree angle! Further to that I'm now an expert at peeing into a bottle, handy for those times when I return to work & am stuck in a surveillance van! It rained nearly non stop, our foul weather gear just couldn't keep the wet out & our thermal gear underneath was soaked after each watch. It was a hunt for dry warm clothes & it seemed if I found some dry clothes & it wasn't raining a wave would break in the cockpit soaking me! Kinda hard to keep smiling when the gods seem to be against you!! Poor Barraveigh was soaked, water in all the bilges, everything was damp & wet clothes hung from everywhere possible or strewn on the floor as we heeled over. On top of everything else my sea legs have not yet returned. I found it a struggle to be below deck & certainly could not even think about using the galley.
All these things resulted in a bad diet, bad routine, lack of positivity & a bad mental state, unable and then unwilling to partake in the duties on board. I just hit that brick wall & wished there was a big emergency button I could hit to make it all stop. I had decided that was it, I was getting off as soon as we hit land. Life at work & in my flat was a life I wanted back.

I'm sitting in an anchorage from hell. The swell in here is so bad we are bouncing around as much as we were out at sea & the rain is non stop. But (& its a huge but), we are stationary. No sails or engine to think of, no navigation to stare at, just sleep, reading & watching some movie's (very hooked of the series Heroes). We have eaten proper meals, cleaned up the boat, emptied & dried the bilges & changed the head sail. Things feel better but I'm still apprehensive. I need to fix this or get off. It's too dangerous to be at sea in that state again. My hotel rest may however have to wait a week or so until we arrive at an island with a hotel worth staying at! Until then, we have a few shorter trips to do. I'm starting my list of ways to keep positive. I'm going to start with my Mums mantra “feeling down, bake something”, I'm off to make peach crumble & custard!

Want to read Bobbys version of events check www.barraveigh.com