If you long to be at sea but shoreside responsibilities are keeping you home, these inspiring quotes will make you feel good about wherever you are on land. Courtesy www.volvooceanrace.org.
"You’re falling asleep all the time on deck because you’ve already been sick, and so you’re through that stage and you’re pretty much debilitated. It’s like your worst hangover plus it affects the whole body, it’s not just your mind or your stomach, it really does affect the whole body. When you’re that sick, you’re trying so hard not to move around anywhere, you’ve got no energy, and you’ve got no control over where you’re moving, so you just keep the body as still as possible. Usually in the fetal position — that is what the body does.
"These boats are undermanned and you’ve still got to sail. The guys would probably let you stay in your bunk, but you just can’t, as you just have to get on and do your job. There’s no eating because that just comes straight back up. But you still have to try and keep some fluids up if you can; have a protein shake or something like that, but even that tends to come up as well. You just have to keep the liquids up and stop the food."
Emma Westmacott from Amer Sports Too is another sufferer. "Seasickness is something that seems to be catching more and more of the sailors on this race. I don’t know if it is something to do with the boats becoming more aggressive, but a lot of people who don’t normally have a problem are coming down with it. I haven’t been seasick for years, but in the first leg I came down badly in the Bay of Biscay. It’s a feeling that you just want to jump off the side of the boat and end it all. It’s miserable; you don’t feel like doing anything, you get lethargic and you get tired. You lose interest in anything except in how manky you feel and pretty much each time you move or change your environment, you end up throwing up.
"You have to go down below and take all your clothes off. You just sit on deck and you just think, ‘how am I going to get down those steps, take my foul-weather gear off, be thrown around, hang it up and get into my bunk without being sick? And then once you have taken your foulies off, it is all over, because you can’t come up on deck to be sick because you would get soaking wet. People get wet and then they get cold. It is just an ever-decreasing circle. It is something that you have to combat early or accept the fact that you have a problem with it. Once you actually are sick, it’s very hard to get better and you only get better when the breeze subsides."
