Slay The Dragon!

Life didn’t get much better. We were about three hundred miles from entering the Mediterranean Sea. As this would be the first time I sailed into this legendary birth of sailing, I was about as giddy as a teenage boy on his first date with Britney Spears.

We’d sailed directly from Antigua to the Azores, and the trip had been made wearing shorts almost the whole way.

Then we got hit by a blow in Horta and had to hole up for about a week. We decided to head out a little before the other boats, as the blow was subsiding.

We left the Azores in some pretty lofty company. Tom, the skipper of the ketch, Ticonderoga, decided to leave at the same time, so we were racing across the channel to Gibraltar. I guess racing isn’t exactly the right word. As we left the islands, all we saw was his stern as it disappeared over the horizon. But still, it was a good feeling to sail with such a true classic yacht.

Yeah, I couldn’t have been more content. We’d lost sight of Ti a couple days earlier, and now we were just dreaming of the adventures that were to come when we entered this new (to us) cruising playground.

Of course, as we all well know, God has a sense of humor. On this particular day I figure She was feeling a particularly peevish.

We’d been sailing at a fair clip with the wind about 120 degrees off our stern. All of a sudden the wind shifted in a gust a little past the 180° mark. The mainsail shifted a little, and all of a sudden the boom was doing a jibe.

I hollered “jibe” at no one in particular, and ducked. Even though our mast is eight feet off the deck, it is still an eerie feeling having a few hundred pounds of aluminum swishing over your head.

And then I watched as, in slow motion (why do bad things always happen in slow motion?) the sheet line dipped down from the boom, grabbed the cute little mushroom thingy that sat atop our pilothouse, and popped it into the sea like a giant kicking a toadstool.

That cute little mushroom was our GPS antenna.

Oh joy. No GPS.

As the rest of the crew appeared on deck, I automatically started the “man-overboard drill” we had practiced so many times. I swung the bow into the wind, pulled the headsail in, eased the main sheet and started the motor. We slowly motored toward the white bobbing object in front of us, as Woody hung over the side to capture it as we pulled along side.

After it was on board we realized just how little we knew about antennas and things. We opened it up, rinsed it with fresh water, and dried it in the sun. When we re-connected it there was no joy in Mudville. The GPS just blinked at us like my VCR used to do.

But, hey, we are world sailors. We know what to do, right? We have our backup. Our trusty Magnavox 4102 satellite receiver. I think every boat sailed in the 80s had one of those, and we had never taken ours off the boat!

(A brief note here. This happened in 1995, before backup handheld GPS were so inexpensive and available.)

We turned it on hopefully, and watched as it started to blink at us just like the GPS. I think they were related.

It soon hit me that, in the “old days” you had to put your position into the thing to get it started. We didn’t know our position.

So, out comes our handy-dandy sextant.

To make a long story short, the 10 years since I’d taken a sight had melted the old memory a bit. It was well after noon the next day when we got our position, as all I could remember was how to take a noon sight (hey, it had been 10 years, ya know!).

We set the Sat Nav, and soon all was well with the world again.

I remember the feeling I had as we entered the Straight of Gibraltar and I first sighted that venerable rock. I also realized that that feeling came not only from entering a new cruising ground, but more from the feeling that we had faced a challenge and solved it.

In the world we live in, we are so protected it is very seldom we can achieve the feeling of self-worth that can only be found after conquering a difficult situation. One where, even for a split second, you feel the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

And that, my friend, is why we go out “there.” For that split second when you can know that feeling of reaping the rewards of your labors.

You have to slay the dragon before you can kiss the Princess!