The Cure for Anything Is Salt Water: How I Threw My Life Overboard and Found Happiness at Sea

223 Pages·2008·1.11 MB·English

by  Mary South

THE
CURE FOR
A N Y T H I N G
IS SALT WATER
How I Threw My Life Overboard and
Found Happiness at Sea
MARY SOUTH
To Vic, for keeping me afloat in so many ways
and
to Karyn, for my happy ending
The cure for anything is salt water—
sweat, tears or the sea.
—ISAK DINESEN

Contents

Epigraph iv
Chapter One
Not long ago, I was probably a lot like you. 1
Chapter Two
So, I was going to follow my salty bliss. 13
Chapter Three
A month before my boat closing, and a week after… 31
Chapter Four
June 23, 2004, was a beautiful day, on its way… 61
Chapter Five
Once we were on the outside, it was clear that… 77
Chapter Six
Murrells Inlet, South Carolina. If you’re ever
in the neighborhood,… 105
Chapter Seven
We left Rudee Inlet at 0730 hours the next morning. 139
Chapter Eight
Well, I thought the trip was over. There was one… 165
Chapter Nine
A couple of evenings after our chat on the stern… 187
Chapter Ten
I know, you can hardly stand the suspense. Does the… 201
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
CHAPTER ONE
It’s never too late to be who you might have been.
—GEORGE ELIOT
Not long ago, I was probably a lot like you. I had a suc-
cessful career, a pretty home, two dogs and a fairly
normal life.
All I kept were the dogs.
Then one day in October 2003, I quit my good job and put
my sweet little house on the market. I packed a duffel bag of
clothes and everything else I owned went into storage. Within
weeks I was the proud owner of an empty bank account and a
40-foot, 30-ton steel trawler that I had no idea how to run. I
enrolled in nine weeks of seamanship school, and two weeks
after my course ended, I pulled away from the dock on my
very first trip: a 1,500-mile journey through the Atlantic from
Florida to Maine.
My transformation from regular person to unhinged mari-
ner started casually enough. Lured to Pennsylvania a few
~ 1 ~
MARY SOUTH
years ago by one more step up the book publishing career
ladder, I had accepted a job that was editorial, managerial
and very dull. I was busy enough at the office but, after work,
I didn’t know what to do with myself. I cooked, took guitar
lessons, went to the gym, drank manhattans, watched movies
at home and read books and magazines. But still I faced an
abundance of excruciatingly quiet free time. On business
trips to the city, I’d stock up on magazines. At first, I read a
predictable assortment for a girl in exile from the big city: the
New Yorker, New York, New York Review of Books.
Okay, it wasn’t all about New York. There was House and
Garden, Dwell, Utne Reader, Maisons Côté Ouest, Vogue, Gour-
met. I’d read just about anything—which is probably how an
occasional Yachting started to find its way into my stockpiles.
When I saw Motorboating, Sail and Powerboating at the local
supermarket, peeking out from behind the overwhelming
number of firearm and bride publications (a combination that
captured the flavor of the area all too well), I thought “Why
not?” Soon, I had completely given up on literature, current
events, even home decor. I started subscriptions to Passage-
maker and Soundings, full year-long commitments. From
there, it was a scary slide down the slippery slope to more ex-
treme, niche titles (Professional Mariner Magazine, Workboat
Magazine, American Tugboat Review) that I just had to have. I
was becoming a trawler junky and I wasn’t sure why.
But let’s backtrack for a moment. I’d better start by admit-
ting I am an optimist—not just your run-of-the-mill, happy-
face, Pollyanna-type. I’m Old School—an extreme optimist of
the sort that went out of style around the time of Don Quixote.
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