Love Boat Is No Match For Big Storm

My desire to go on a cruise is waning.

So is my desire to go hot-tubbing, except with my inflatable “Barney” water wings. Lately, I have been wary of all bodies of water, to the point at which I have been wearing my fishing waders into the snow puddle at our curbside, which attains depths of up to three-quarters of an inch. Guffaw at this scene if you must, but one thing I have learned through hard experience: A person never knows when a killer storm might arise, even in a normally calm body of water such as the Atlantic Ocean or my curbside puddle.

Books are partly responsible. In recent months, I have been reading too many true tales of sea disasters. The first one was “The Perfect Storm,” a perfectly marvelous book except for the fact that author Sebastian Junger explains in excruciating detail what it feels like to drown.

“When the first involuntary breath occurs most people are still conscious, which is unfortunate, because the only thing more unpleasant than running out of air is breathing in water,” writes Junger, perkily. “At that point, the person goes from voluntary to involuntary apnea, and the drowning begins in earnest. A spasmodic breath drags water into the mouth and the windpipe, and then …”

What? You don’t want to hear any more? Actually, I found the description absolutely fascinating, although when I read it, my body went through its own involuntary reaction, called “whimpering.”

That’s because Junger goes on to explain that the drowning person can die one of two ways: by sucking in a big, heaping bucket of seawater and gurgling to death, or by having a painful laryngospasm and suffocating to death.

Gosh, this book is a regular “Chicken Soup for the Boat-Lover’s Soul.”

The second book is called “Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea,” by Gary Kinder, and it concerns a much more pleasant subject, a treasure salvage operation netting millions of dollars in gold bullion. Unfortunately, a treasure salvage operation inevitably requires a ship that has sunk, and Kinder devotes several chapters to the 1857 sinking of the cruise ship Central America. He wrote one fascinating passage in which he explains that first you get sucked down by the vortex of the sinking hull with a pressure that rips the life jacket off your body, and then the planks and hatch covers and jagged timbers from the sinking ship come rocketing up from the depths to impale you.

This book is a fascinating read, too, as long as you have no Caribbean Love Boat cruises booked anytime soon.

Then there’s “Titanic,” the movie that everybody has been talking about for over a year. Frankly I have been too busy reading disaster-at-sea books to have actually seen this movie yet, but I hear that something unpleasant happens to a ship in that one, too. For all I know, the movie depicts actual laryngospasms.

My wariness about big ships in big storms isn’t all from book-learnin’. My wife, Carol, and I spent one traumatic night of our honeymoon in the middle of a whopper of an Atlantic storm. Only recently have I been able to get her anywhere near the kiddie pool at Comstock.

We were on the car ferry between Bristol, England, and Cork, no more than two hours out of port when I noticed something odd. The waves were smashing against our window. I thought this was curious, since we were THREE DECKS ABOVE THE WATERLINE.

Also, I couldn’t help but notice that this huge ship was performing a series of stomach-wrenching free-falls, each one followed by a strange shuddering sensation at the bottom, as if the ship itself was having a laryngospasm. Being a landlubber, I thought this was business as usual for the North Atlantic.

Then I lurched my way to the head, and I noticed that nearly everyone on the ship was already there, being loudly seasick. Then I noticed that one of them was the captain.

Hmm, I thought, maybe this IS a pretty bad storm. So I went back to my seat and tried to console Carol by singing a happy little tune that was popular at the time.

She immediately staggered to the ladies’ head and I didn’t see her again for about eight hours. She was either too seasick to leave the head, or she didn’t want to hear any more of my song, which was “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

“She might have broke up or she might have capsized, she may have broke deep and took water,” I sang in a sprightly tenor.

Unlike the Edmund Fitzgerald, we didn’t break up or capsize, but when we arrived in Ireland eight hours after our scheduled time, we learned that a freighter did indeed go down that night, not far from our waters. The winds went to Force 10, flooding coastal Ireland. Every other passenger run to Ireland was canceled. Our ferry, the newspaper stories noted, had been too far out to call back.

After that experience, I was lucky to get Carol back home at all. Carol maintained for several days that she had no intention of allowing her body to ever be on, over, or anywhere near that ocean again. Since Ireland is an island, the solution seemed obvious. We’d just have to live there forever.

I, too, was traumatized by the experience, but as the years went by, I forgot about the danger and remembered only the majesty of the mighty waves. I have actually been toying with the idea of a deep-sea cruise again. But then I read about laryngospasms. I suddenly had a light-headed feeling, almost as if I were experiencing that storm again.

Or maybe I was experiencing oxygen deprivation, since at the time I was busily huffing and puffing on those “Barney” water-wings.