Boom and Bust!

So, campers. It’s certainly been a long time since my last post. Life got a bit complicated, and time somehow didn’t get the memo. It just kept marching along, until here we are, two years later.

In my last post, I talked about Rick’s family get-together in Maine/New Hampshire, and also about our visit with Rick’s father Dick, who had been recovering from a pretty debilitating stroke. If anyone actually follows this blog, it would seem that we dropped off the edge of the earth after that. Maybe the world is flat after all?

The story is that Rick and I made our good-byes, and headed back South towards Baltimore. We had made it as far as Chesapeake City, and were planning a leisurely few days in the Chesapeake before returning to house, jobs and responsibility, when we got a call from Barb, Rick’s sister. Dick had taken a turn for the worse and the end of his life was near. Rick needed to get back up to Maine as soon as possible, so we raced back to Baltimore in one day with the boat, and Rick flew up to Portland the next. Dick passed away a week later.

Dick had been one of my favorite people, and he had probably been my biggest fan and most avid reader of the blog. I’d had several blog posts yet to be written but still in mind when he passed, and I really did intend to write them up, but somehow – and please excuse the nautical reference – the wind had just gone out of my sails. After several months had gone by, I finally decided that I would just start it up again the next summer.

Dick and Rick, 2009

Barb and Rick talked often by phone that fall, and in the course of their conversations they hatched a plan, in part a tribute to Dick's memory, to charter a sailboat in the British Virgin Islands for the Easter break. David and Jane, who were friends of Barb and Jeff from Maine, would join us on a boat that could accommodate three couples. This was to be the trip of a lifetime; sun, surf and snorkeling in a sailing paradise!

And it Was!

 - until it wasn’t... Rick handed off the wheel to someone else, as he is prone to do, giving others a chance at captaining, and was standing in the companionway when the boat accidently started to gybe. Rick, acting on instinct, reached up to grab the lines, probably intending to prevent the boom from crossing over, or at least from crossing over quickly. Of course if he’d had a moment to think, he would have realized that this was a much bigger boat than any of the boats he had regularly sailed on. Bigger boat, bigger sail, there was obviously much more power in that accidental jibe than his arm could possibly hold. Unfortunately, he did not have more than an instant to correct his automatic response. The boom crossed to the other side of the boat in one violent motion, ripping Rick’s shoulder right out of its socket.

Rick was the only real sailor on that boat, and he was in a great deal of pain and obviously out of commission, but somehow he was able to coach the five of us in sailing craft, and with some luck, we managed to get the boat ashore. Rick spent a night in the hospital in Tortola where the excellent doctors (British health system) got his shoulder back where it was supposed to be. With his arm in a sling, Rick was able to join the rest of us on the boat where we finished out the rest of the week in a fun, but certainly more subdued manner.

Back in Baltimore, it became clear that Rick’s shoulder was much worse off than we had hoped. The MRI revealed that the incident on the boat had torn two of his rotator cuff tendons completely off of the bone, and surgery was necessary if he ever wanted to raise his right arm above his navel. The good news of course was that such a surgery was possible; the bad news was that the surgery required a recovery time of six months to a year for a successful outcome. No sailing.

Be careful what you wish for. Over the last several years I had been longing for a summer at home, relaxing in my sewing room, enjoying the farmers’ market and being near our friends. In my fantasies however, I had envisioned small outings in the boat, exploring the Chesapeake. I had not bargained for a husband in pain and with a broken wing. Considering, we had a very enjoyable summer. But we both missed the boat, which stood abandoned and ignored on the hard, and I let the blog languish as well.

More than a year after the surgery, and with Rick’s shoulder at 95%, we have finally managed to get the boat in the water, and are once again on our way up north. Yay – new adventures (and hopefully only minor catastrophes)!