The Cure for Anything Is Salt Water: How I Threw My Life Overboard and Found Happiness at Sea by Mary South

Author:Mary South [South, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Developmental, Psychology, Sailing, Boats and Boating, Travel, Essays & Travelogues, Sports & Recreation, General, Boating, Personal Memoirs, Women Sailors, Midlife Crisis, Biography & Autobiography, Adulthood & Aging, Women
ISBN: 9780060747039
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2007-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

O, God, thy sea is so great, and my boat is so small.

-ANONYMOUS

Burrells Inlet, South Carolina. If you're ever in the neighborhood, stop by. Tucked back behind a strip of shoreline north of Pawley's Island and south of Myrtle Beach, it was one of the friendliest places we visited. We had headed in a little early, after a blessedly uneventful day underway. The inlet was easy to run and opened onto a serene and gorgeous landscape-the late-afternoon sun setting lush patches of wetland ablaze with light. It seemed like we had entered another world, a secret spot that was amber and languid. After Charleston, which had been both difficult to get in and out of and very expensive, we were ready for a harbor that was distinctly not commercial. We had found it.

As we pulled into the little marina we'd found for the night, a small crowd of people came out to watch us tie up.

Most of them had beers in their hands, but they were young and old, tattooed and preppy. A little boy hung around his father's knees and peeked shyly out at us. As I went below to make sure the battery charger was on and everything looked good in the engine room, I heard John talking to the folks on the dock. He had secured the lines and then immediately dipped into the cooler of Bud Light he kept on deck. Now he leaned against the hull with one hand and punctuated his conversation with the beer in his other. John knew the answer to every question about the Bossanova as well as I did, and it made me laugh to hear him-mostly because I could have sworn I heard a swell of proprietary pride behind his expansive responses. Listening to him now, you'd never guess that he was a fan of cigarette boats and Carolina-style sport fishers.

Every time some slick Miami Vice-style boat whizzed past us, John would grow positively misty-eyed as he watched it fade quickly from the horizon. But I suspected he was starting to fall for the slow and shippy Bossanova. Maybe it was the sturdy way she'd carried us through some rough spots where a fast, planning race boat would have bounced around like a toy. Or maybe it was just another case of Stockholm syndrome.

It's hard to believe two people could spend as much time with each other as John and I did without getting a lot more intimate. Though we spent long hours in the pilothouse together, our unspoken agreement to avoid topics of dissension eliminated most conversational avenues. We whiled away the hours talking about Chapman pals and incidents, telling each other funny stories about our friends, planning our voyage strategy and listening to any kind of music we could agree on, which usually fell in that middle ground that neither of us loved.

The most personal things I ever found out about John were these: right after college, he got married and shortly thereafter divorced; and his previous

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