Chapter 1
The First Crew Meeting
With the introductions out of the way, Georgia got right down to business. "There are a few pieces of required equipment. First, you'll need a pair of deck shoes that won't scuff up the boat. And you'll need a pair of sailing gloves, to prevent rope burn. Another thing is a whistle, to blow in case someone goes overboard. You'll also need a small flashlight. Finally, you should keep a candy bar with you at all times. Eating a candy bar is a great way to kill time when you've fallen overboard, and are waiting for us to rescue you. I suggest a Snicker's bar."
It wasn't like we were just going to send Georgia our money, wait for the appointed date, and just show up at the boats and go. We had planning to do -- lots of planning -- and Georgia was the one that was going to do it all. The rest of us just had to stand back and watch.
Which brings us to the first of the two pre-trip crew meetings. "Crew meeting" is just a fancy name for a get together session that serves two basic functions. First, to let Georgia tell us what sort of trouble she's gotten us into so far, and second, to allow everyone to meet the people they're going to spend their week in hell with. The meetings themselves were strategically spaced to serve those two purposes while at the same time giving us enough time in between them to convince ourselves that we'd really just imagined the last meeting -- they couldn't possibly have been like that.
In truth, the first crew meeting was a sort of ephemeral thing, mainly because most of the plans that Georgia presented at this meeting were laid to waste by the addition of another eight or so people who signed up afterward. By crew meeting standards, if there are standards for such things, this one was pretty tame.
We met at Georgia's house, and spilled pizza all over her charts, checklists and handouts. We introduced ourselves to each other (don't ask me to tell you who was there because I forgot every name before I'd even pressed palms). Some faces were familiar from that weekend outing (I seem to remember Georgia's face, for instance) and others were total strangers (and built to stay that way).
Georgia presented the ground rules, which went pretty much as follows:
- Shut up
- Do everything that Georgia says
Seemed pretty simple to me. We were taught that orders came from God, to Georgia, to the captain of the boat, to us. The only exceptions to that chain of command were that Kathy had all the money, and Georgia had veto power over God once underway.
We talked for a very short while about our individual dietary requirements. After that, we were told that we'd all eat whatever Georgia told us to eat, and we'd damn well better like it. Right about here, I began to detect a pattern.
Georgia gave us a short lecture on her planning for the trip. As far as any of us could tell, she was planning on getting every major corporation on the eastern seaboard to sponsor us, which meant that we'd have to prominently display every single sponsor's logo (in the form of tee-shirt decals) anytime when we were in port. In other words, we were going to wear whatever Georgia told us to wear.
You know, right around here, the trip wasn't sounding so bad. Of course, it was still a couple of months away, what with this meeting being held in November and all. Even still, it sounded like I wasn't going to have to make a single decision for myself, the whole time.
Like I said, there wasn't much to the crew meeting. We broke up in late afternoon, and decided to go out for a little sailing trip on the lake. The official excuse for this was to provide some measure of orientation for those among us who didn't have any sailing experience. The real reason was to provide each of us with a little taste of the misery we were all in for.
Perhaps you thought harshly of me when in the introduction, I described the participants in this exercise as fools with money, in need of separation. Well, how would you describe a group of nine or ten people who decide to go sailing in the middle of a frigid lake, in the middle of November, right around nightfall? However you'd describe such a group, I'd describe them as "us," because that's just what we did.
Georgia's friend Roger had a rather nice boat that was moored about ten miles from nowhere, somewhere along the darkest segment of the lake's coastline. We were ferried out to the boat, two at a time, in a dinghy that had a capacity of about two cubic feet.
It was cold that night. Damned cold. Cold enough that no one wanted to look at the thermometer and run the risk of either confirming our worst fears, or finding out that we were just being pansies. There was a wind blowing across the lake that'd hit you in the face just like a drunken freight train. Of course, that's the whole idea of sailing -- if the weather was nice, you wouldn't get anywhere.
We sailed out a few miles, then decided to turn around and head back. It was all pretty uneventful, except for being colder than.... Well, it was just cold. It was also pretty uneventful when the powers that be (Georgia and Roger) decided to drop sail a few miles away from shore and involve us in an hour long argument over whether or not we were getting any closer to land. I forget who won the argument, but basically, we were dead in the water right up until we started drifting farther away from shore.
So, that's how a lot of the little outing went. Most of us were sitting there freezing our butts off, except for Georgia, who was once again sitting at the wheel with that shit eating grin frozen on her face. I quietly entertained thoughts of testing my hypothesis that one small thwack with a ball-peen hammer would shatter that grin right off her face.
They (Georgia and Roger) eventually decided to motor back in to the mooring.
Wait a minute!!! You mean these things have engines? What the hell have we been doing, messing around with those stupid sails for, when we could have run the engine???
It would have been anticlimactic, except that no one could really see where the dinghy had been moored, and everyone was freezing, and no one could move their feet anymore. Surprisingly, we got back to shore (and later, home) intact, and even more surprisingly, no one decided to back out of the trip afterward.
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