No Playmate!

Steve's pinched a nerve in his back and has been out of commission for the
past three days - no playmate for me! (That hugely heavy starter motor
probably did it!) He's been limited to lying down, reading and sitting up
for just long enough to inhale his food before having to lie back down
again. Luckily we're in the perfect anchorage (beautiful, good holding,
shops, fairly calm and it has wifi!) which has makes the required stillness
much easier on both of us.

One thing that comes to light during times like this is what a team
operation this is, how much of a team we are, and that actually we haven't
adequately prepared for when one of the team is out of commission.

This boat takes two people to run it. You could run it with one, but some
things would need to be set up differently than they are currently. One
reason I haven't moved the boat by myself is that with Steve out, I cannot
get the dingy (actually the motor) back on the boat by myself. There are
some things that it takes two of us to do.

There are also some things that I do not know how to do as I've discovered.
I didn't know how to light the barbeque, I don't know how to bring in the
anchor, I didn't know how to do the morning engine check. In our team,
Steve barbeques and is master of the engine domain. By only one of us
knowing how to do something, we have no duplication in skills, so we're not
prepared for one of us (particularly Steve) to be out of commission. We
have plenty of redundancy in systems (parts, tools, etc.), but not
redundancy in skills. Not insurmountable, but something we have to work on.
I now know how to work the barbeque.

(Btw, while I was barbequing chicken wings the other night, there was a six
foot shark hovering right next to the boat. He hung around for the longest
time. Do you think sharks like buffalo wings? Well, he wasn't getting any
of mine!)

This whole sailing experience forces you to become stronger as a team. You
have to work together to get most of the day to day business done. To run
to the store, it takes two to get the 'car' in the water and put its engine
and other bits (life jackets, gas tank, anchor) on. To move to a new
location, takes two, one to drive the boat and one to pull up the anchor and
arrange the sails. Even dinner takes two, one to cook and one to wash up.
There is this constant interaction and intermingling as we work together
which we did to a certain extent on land, but not anywhere near as much as
we do now. It forces you to be very careful about how you treat the other
person, we're often in high stress situations and it would be easy to take
that stress out on each other, but that isn't really very teamlike, is it?
We've learned a great deal about how to speak to each other so that we end a
day with a hug and a "Well done!" rather than stressed and shrieking at each
other like some folks we've heard about. So if nothing else from all of
this, we've strengthened how we work together and are a much better team for
it!

(But I'll like it much better when Steve is back to his normal self, the
engine room is not for me - and I miss my playmate!)