I woke up, and she wasn’t there. Gone, again. What’s wrong with these women? I grabbed the remote and the bottle, staring blankly at the screen while action plans and strategies flashed through my mind. It felt like a sailboat facing down the buildup of a tropical cyclone in the Southern Atlantic. You sail, and yet you don’t. But there’s no way out. And the happiness lasts only as long as there’s booze left on the boat.
Mine would last about two weeks.
A friend called. He asked if I’d join him and another colleague to go see a certain captain who knew harbormasters and claimed he could help us convert our Yachtmaster licenses to STCW-compliant captain’s licenses. We were all fed up with skippering for the rich, watching their theatrics, vanity, and steady consumption of alcohol and cocaine, and thought it would be nice to captain a passenger ship or a small cruiser. As far as I knew, it wasn’t possible—but I went anyway. Just to hear what the guy had to say. Just to get out of my life, for a while.
Tales of the Atlantic
2 | The Call of the Sea
I woke up, and she wasn’t there. Gone, again. What’s wrong with these women? I grabbed the remote and the bottle, staring blankly at the screen while action plans and strategies flashed through my mind. It felt like a sailboat facing down the buildup of a tropical cyclone in the Southern Atlantic. You sail, and yet you don’t. But there’s no way out. And the happiness lasts only as long as there’s booze left on the boat.
Mine would last about two weeks.
A friend called. He asked if I’d join him and another colleague to go see a certain captain who knew harbormasters and claimed he could help us convert our Yachtmaster licenses to STCW-compliant captain’s licenses. We were all fed up with skippering for the rich, watching their theatrics, vanity, and steady consumption of alcohol and cocaine, and thought it would be nice to captain a passenger ship or a small cruiser. As far as I knew, it wasn’t possible—but I went anyway. Just to hear what the guy had to say. Just to get out of my life, for a while.