Aging with a Boat

The year my wife and I both turned 74, we had our first big sailing scare. This was four years ago, near the end of a pleasant and otherwise uneventful afternoon daysail. I had furled the jib and started the motor, and Patty edged out to the foredeck as usual to douse the staysail. Abruptly she crouched to the deck and clutched her chest with an ominous yelp. “Sharp pain in my chest!” she cried.

“Get back to the cockpit!” I shouted.

“I can’t move!” she whimpered, and the emergency became real. She was in a precarious place, and our 21′ cutter has no lifelines.

I dropped the mainsail in an unceremonious heap—it’s a gaffer, and dousing it normally involves a time-consuming fuss of flaking and rolling—and called 911 for an ambulance to meet us at the dock. I aimed the boat at the marina, locked the tiller, and scrambled to the foredeck to help her back to the cockpit. In five minutes, we were at the dock, where waiting EMTs hustled her to an ambulance.

It turned out not to be a heart attack. The hospital never found the cause; she recovered fully, and there’s been no recurrence. But the event served as a dramatic reminder that we’re not immortal.

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