Coming out of South Dakota, I had never seen the ocean outside of movies until I went to UC-Berkley. I've always enjoyed trying new things, so I joined the University sailing team as soon as I was eligible, and before I knew it, I was off on a solo cruise to the sunny Catalina Islands off the coast of Southern California.
To make a long story short, the friggin' Pacific storm that was supposed to turn south turned north, and hit me on my second day out. Through some miracle, the boat wasn't sunk by the forty foot waves, but we did get blown aground, hard enough to tear a hole in the hull below the waterline and throw us a good twenty feet beyond the high tide mark. I jumped off the deck onto the beach and realized I didn't have the faintest idea where I was.
My boat wasn't going anywhere for a hell of a long time, I'd lost all my supplies, clothes, books, food and first aid kit when a particularly bad wave had crashed over the deck, so there wasn't much left to me but going inland.
Just when I was feeling the worst, clothes in tatters, bleeding from my forehead,lost, trudging up the gravel road...the damn storm started up. Again.
To make a long story short, the friggin' Pacific storm that was supposed to turn south turned north, and hit me on my second day out. Through some miracle, the boat wasn't sunk by the forty foot waves, but we did get blown aground, hard enough to tear a hole in the hull below the waterline and throw us a good twenty feet beyond the high tide mark. I jumped off the deck onto the beach and realized I didn't have the faintest idea where I was.
My boat wasn't going anywhere for a hell of a long time, I'd lost all my supplies, clothes, books, food and first aid kit when a particularly bad wave had crashed over the deck, so there wasn't much left to me but going inland.
Just when I was feeling the worst, clothes in tatters, bleeding from my forehead,lost, trudging up the gravel road...the damn storm started up. Again.
