Episode #3: Salt water is not our friend

 NOT OUR FRIEND

By Alexandra 25. August 2015

Close your eyes and picture this: it’s hot, it’s summer, you are on vacation. You are at the beach and you’ve been lying there in the sun, bronzing. In your swim wear. When you feel the need to cool off, you jump into the clear blue and amazingly fresh water of the ocean. You dive and you float and it’s fantastic and fresh, there are small little waves, maybe you do some body surfing, you let the water rock you back and forth. Then you get out and dry in the sun, a little while later you take your towel and return to your apartment or house or hotel and you take a shower before you put new clothes on. Sounds good, hey?

I love the ocean. Swimming in the salt water is one of my favorite things to do in life.

But this is not what salt water is like while crossing the ocean on a sailing boat. There is no shower afterwards and possible no change of clothes.

In retrospect, I am once again thankful for my lack of high expectations for something I have never done before. “I’ll deal it with it when I get there” is a highly recommendable approach. It leaves room for surprises, in both directions of course.

In this case, I can say with certainty that I underestimated salt water.

Marc (el Capi) told us this, of course. But who would’ve thunk that this crystal blue substance strongly linked to holiday feeling and brown skin and the smell of Hawaiian Tropic is something to be avoided while on a sailboat…

Here is why.

1. Salty wet things don’t dry on the ocean. They miraculously stay damp. (i.e. sleeping bag)
2. Salt water ruins food. In cans. In only 3 days.
3. When salt water dries, it leaves a salt crust, on surfaces such as boat decks or human skin. That salt crust hurts your butt cheeks if you sit on it all day with only shorts on.
4. You cannot drink salt water. The thought that we could dehydrate and die while sitting on gazillions of liters of water crossed my mind a few times. And it’s absurdity struck me each time.
5. You cannot swim in salt water when sailing, you can only look at it. Because when you are crossing the ocean, you don’t stop. 24hour sailing killed the swim-in-the-ocean-star
6. Salt water makes your hands so shrively white you look like you took a bath in a tub. for a week.
7. Salt water comes in waves. waves come over board. waves make you very very wet and cold.
8. Salt water starts smelling pretty funky after a (very short) while.
9. (Salt) water will find it’s way inside the boat, it’s not so unlike ants on land. When the sea got rough, it was raining inside the boat, literally.

Salt water is almost as badass as the honey badger.