JUST WRITE!
Don't rock the boat, baby
By Tracey Coveart/The Scugog Standard

Some people say you should live with a man before you marry him. I can go one better. You should spend a night on a boat with him.

Friends of ours were on their way to Kingston for a month-long holiday in their 41-foot sailboat and invited Rob and I to meet up with them in Cobourg for a relaxing night on the water.

I should explain that boats and I don’t get along all that well. I suffer from motion sickness in elevators and swimming pools, so boats present the risk of nausea on a Titanic scale.

Although I have very few memories from my childhood, I have a vivid recollection of crossing Georgian Bay on The Penguin to Tobermory to visit Flowerpot Island when I was about six. The waves were so vigorous that the threat of being swept overboard was very real and the only images of I have of the legendary flowerpot formations are in the photographs my dad took. The rest is a blur of dizziness, fear and vomit.

The same held true for our 12-hour crossing to Newfoundland when I was 10. The moment my dad’s beer glass slid across the table toward me in the dining room and then back into his hand, I hightailed it for the bathroom. The only thing worse than the crossing itself was the knowledge that we would have to repeat the adventure in order to get back home. I actually considered staying behind and getting my parents to ship my stuffies.

After that, all I had to do was set foot on a boat - even while it was tied to a dock - to set my stomach churning. Which made life pretty unbearable as a kid, when it came to ferry crossings to Toronto Island or just a toot around the lake in a paddle boat, Gravol and I were inseparable. And even that often wasn’t enough.

I ‘canoed the Nonquon’ one fateful year and by the time my partner and I got to the Seagrave bridge, I was so ill I contemplated pouring myself out of the vessel and laying facedown in the swampy river until I either drowned or died of some horrible bacterial infection.

One thing I have learned by trial and error is that alcohol helps. While on a sailboat in St. Lucia, I sipped wine (post Gravol), blocking out the pitching and yawing of the boat beneath me. I didn’t barf. In fact, I even managed to take a few photos and enjoy the odd canape.
Armed with this knowledge, I packed my bottle of Gravol with Ginger (a natural anti-nauseant) and a few bottled Caesars as soon as I found out about our marina rendezvous on Saturday.

Although the drugs make me drowsy and the alcohol makes me stupid, I quickly downed both the moment I set foot on Matt and DL’s beautiful boat. Fortunately for me (but not so much for DL who was still quite green around the gills when we arrived), the couple had encountered some rough seas during their passage from Whitby to Cobourg and we would be spending the night attached to the pier. We had a lovely dinner, with dry land just a few feet away in case of an emergency, and were ready to turn in shortly after 1 a.m.

Rob and I were in the forecabin, and I was quite excited and more than a little proud of myself. This would be my first time drifting off into a peaceful slumber on a boat, instead of forcing myself unconscious as a means of self-preservation.

Alas, it was not to be. Rob found the cabin sweltering and had to maximize his surface area for cooling, which forced me face first against the wall. His stomach was upset, which caused him to twitch and thrash all night long and, because he could only lay on his back, his snoring was so loud is must have kept the sailors awake on Lake Ontario. Adding to my misfortune was the fact that ducks, apparently, do not sleep, preferring instead to quack around the clock. People in Cobourg apparently do not sleep either, and they spent the night walking along the promenade beside our boat shouting back and forth to one another in friendly greeting. The smoke alarm in our cabin started going off at around 3 a.m. and was only silenced when our captain unceremoniously detached it from the wall. And I had to get up at 7:30 a.m. to feed the parking meter.

It wasn’t the ideal getaway, but at least I know that if Rob and I ever do decide to get hitched, we won’t have to fork out extravagant amounts of cash to spend our honeymoon on a cruise ship.