Greg's take on the 40 Hours

I have been negligent in my blogging. Almost a week into the trip I am making my first post. I would actually contest that I am over three months in since the preparation was such an essential part of it. So I'm a slug.

As I think about the poor job I've done posting, I want to defend myself briefly. After all, I have had to grapple with the delicacies of explaining how my hands ended up down another man's pants, dodging the lapse in judgement of eating a Big Mac one hour before going out to sea in a small boat, and saving face over the many misadventures we overcame. After a particularly hard fought game of spoons, I feel that grappling is my strong point, so here goes.

The first leg of the voyage began well despite the fact that my stomach was already upset an hour before we even set sail. I would describe my illness with the polite nautical term, but nautical terms are rarely polite, so I will simply say beaver fever. It came on suddenly, and did not seem to have lasting effects, so off I went leaving the majority of the work to Sean and Dave. We said heartfelt goodbyes to our friends and respective families and put-put-puttered out Casco Bay until our engine simply put-put-puttered out. The Moxie being a sailing vessel we saw this as no more than a slight hiccough. We raised the sails.

It was a clear starry night, beautiful full moon to the south, and a strong breeze filled our sails. I was below decks for the most part, overcoming my illness, until dinnertime. Since I was already sick and am not a particular fan of Raman noodles anyway, I gladly took the tiller so that Sean and Dave could have theirs. Naturally this is when everything started going to hell.

Things started out well, but every so often I would come a little off course, or the dinghy would dip a little towards the water as we heeled over. Still, things seemed under control, and I kept on sailing and Sean and Dave kept on eating. But a little became a lot, and towards became into, and from one second to the next the dinghy was hanging in the water, about to go in after all the lines we had been keeping inside it. I hollered, "All hands on deck! Quick! Get the dinghy!" or as Dave recounts it, I screamed like a girl. Girl or little girl, can't quite remember, don't quite want to. Sean came and grabbed the tiller, Dave and I grabbed the dinghy, and we wrestled it back onto the davits with all our might. Phew, that's the end of that. I went down below again, now not only to rest off my beaver fever, but also to settle down from the excitement of the nearly lost dinghy.

Please forgive me if the rest of my story is somewhat chaotic and confused, I mean only to give an accurate representation of the voyage, and that seems to be the best way I can do it.

While I cannot remember exactly the shifts that passed from Dinghy a New Hope to the Dinghy Strikes Back, I remember that Dave was at the tiller(his turn to scream), and Sean and I were down below. Sean dashed up to grab the tiller once more, Dave grabbed the dinghy, and I grabbed Dave. As attractive as Dave is I didn't really want my hand down his pants, I just really didn't want him down in the water. With the wind and spray whipping us on, and a little help from Sean's bestial roar, we managed to get dinghy up on the bow.

And tomorrow is a brand new day. Hoorah, we've made it through the night, we can see what's around us. And it all looks the same when you're twenty miles off the coast. That wave's big. That one is too. That one below me is now full of spew. Sorry, that's just what happens, and it happened several times during our harrowing 28 hour voyage.

And the 30 knot winds don't only take a beating on your stomach, they can do it to your nice newly remounted winch blocks too. They dismounted ours. One of them anyway, which severely limited our approach under sail to Newburyport Mass on the Merrimac River where we were already headed to fix
our engine and davits. So much so, that we arrived after dark and our batteries had already discharged overnight, making us a stealth sailboat. And so stealth sailboat was pitted against stealth nav markers, and stealth sailboat did not win. We ran aground spent the next twelve or fourteen hours checking our anchor line and reassuring the Coast Guard that we were well and had food and water aboard.

When that night finally ended Pete drove down from Maine in less than two hours to rescue us, and so began our adventures in Newburyport, which have been a marked turn for the better, and which I hope to recount later.

Greg