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of Good Hope whose sailboat went end over end in a giant wave. She broke her leg, but they survived. To me, this didn't sound like fun.
I realized that my idea of thrill-seeking is reading books about thrill seekers. I am not an adrenalin junky. Walking out on stage was scary enough for me and I was amazed at the sailing stories my friends told me.
About a year later I moved the boat to Eagle Harbor on Bainbridge Island, across from Seattle. There I met Dean and Kopi Carmine who were true ocean sailors. They'd bought a 27-foot lake boat because that was all they could afford and Dean reinforced the fiberglass hull and all the fittings so they could go ocean sailing. They took it from Seattle down to the Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific and then up to Hawaii and back to Seattle. All this in a 27-foot lake boat. Damn.
Dean is one of those guys who knows a lot about everything and is great at working on boats, so he can get a job anywhere in the world.
We had another guy in the marina who'd sailed his boat to Hawaii and back single-handed, and one night he set the boat on auto pilot and went below to get an hour or two of sleep. He awoke to find his boat scraping along the hull of a giant container ship. Somehow, his boat survived and he made it to port.
My adventures were way smaller.
One day I learned that emergencies never come alone. If something is going to go wrong, other things will go wrong at the same time. We were motoring and we smelled smoke. The control panel was on fire. Luckily I got to the fire extinguisher before it spread, but two other things went wrong at the same time. I can't remember what they were, because I'm old and it was 40 years ago. I think we were taking on water through the stuffing box or something. Anyway, we survived.
Another time we ran aground, which sounds like a big deal but it wasn't. It was another light breeze day on Puget Sound and we got too close to shore. We were just drifting with the sails flapping and suddenly we just stopped. If you're going to run aground, that's the only way to go. Luckily we were on a rising tide and a half hour later I was able to motor off.
The most dangerous adventure was one time I was sailing back from the San Juan Islands with a young couple on vacation. We were sailing across the Straights of Juan de Fuca which separates Puget Sound from Canada. The wind was blowing against the tide, so it was choppy and slow and I was tired. I was aiming for a channel between Port Townsend and Whidbey Island but didn't realize the tide was pushing us toward the island. A fishing boat came out from Port Townsend and motored toward me and circled. I thought that's strange, so I took a look around an realized I was way to close to shore. I flipped on the depth finder and I was in 15 feet of water over a rocky bottom and my boat had a 6-foot keel. I