Important Notice
Adult Spring Break is this weekend! What better way to celebrate the start of Summer than with drunk women in thongs dancing on the beach! If I survive the fun in the sun, I’ll report back with some indecent photojournalism.
Let’s Go Sailing
While I’m thinking about beach life, let me tell you a story about two drunk ball players on a sailing adventure.
While I was in the minor leagues, we’d play 144 games from the first week of April through the end of August. Rainouts were a gift from God, an opportunity to see a movie or hit the bar, but the gift came with a price – a doubleheader in the future. Nobody liked doubleheaders. The only thing worse than doubleheaders were having to play extra-inning games – that was like having to work overtime and not getting paid for it! But scheduled off-days were golden, a day to plan an adventure, with no strings attached.
It was 1976, I was playing for the Savannah Braves (AA). It was an off-day, so a group of us decided to invade the beach at Hilton Head. We packed our ice chests full of beer, grabbed a couple of beach chairs, some beach towels, a couple of frisbees, and headed for Hilton Head. It took us about an hour to drive to the beach. We passed some beautiful homes and well-manicured golf courses, but we weren’t there to sightsee, we were there to have some fun in the sun and drink lots of beer.
It was a weekday, so we had the beach to ourselves. We arranged our beach chairs and towels around the ice chests, and started pounding beer, playing frisbee, and splashing around in the surf. Things started to slow down after a few hours of too much sun and beer. While everyone else was hanging out by the ice chests taking it easy, Jerry and I noticed some Sunfish Sailboats for rent. We walked over to the lifeguard and asked him how much it cost to rent a sailboat. He said it was $12.00/hr. We told him that we only had $8.00. He shook their head. We looked around and pointed out that there was no one else on the beach, so $8.00 would be better than nothing. He sighed and took our $8.00. He asked us if we had ever sailed before, and we both said, “Sure!” (In case you didn’t know, “Sure” does not mean yes.)
We loaded up the sailboat with a six-pack of beer and an underwater mask (not sure why we took an underwater mask – maybe we’d find some sunken treasure?). Yeah, we were a little bit drunk; still functional, but lacking good judgment. We set sail and took off out to sea. It didn’t take long before we mastered the art of sailing, so we needed to step up our game. Jerry decided that it might be fun to hang off the back of the sailboat and troll for sharks, so he grabbed a short rope and jumped in the water, while I manned the sail and pulled him behind the boat. It looked like fun, so after a while we switched places, and I was the shark bait. No Jaws sighting, so I climbed back in the boat, and we decided to see how fast we could make this little boat go!
We caught some wind in the sail and tried to make the boat heel while we leaned over the upwind side – visions of Americas Cup! Suddenly, the wind died, the boat capsized, and our beer went overboard. Jerry grabbed the underwater mask and started diving after the beer, but to no avail. Now we were in the middle of the ocean, hanging onto a capsized sailboat with no provisions.
Getting a capsized sailboat flipped upright is not an easy task, especially when you don’t know what you’re doing. Fortunately, we had the underwater mask, so we took turns diving below the boat to loosen the sail so that it wouldn’t create as much drag when we tried to flip the boat upright. After several tries, we finally got the boat upright. When we looked back toward shore, we could see that Hilton Head was indeed an island. Little did we know that the lifeguards had lost sight of us, even with the aid of their binoculars!
We started sailing back toward shore, but misjudged a gust of wind and capsized the boat again. No worries, we had figured this shit out. Before we could start the process of getting the boat upright, a Hobie Cat sailed up out of nowhere with two lifeguards yelling at us to put our life jackets on. We assured them that we were fine and didn’t need life jackets. One of the lifeguards said, “Put your fucking life jackets on and swim over to this catamaran! Now!” Meanwhile, the other lifeguard jumped off the Cat and took over our Sunfish.
Jerry and I sat on the Hobie Cat’s trampoline while the lifeguard was sailing us back to shore. We were about halfway, when Jerry asked him if he could get the boat going fast enough to heel it onto one pontoon. The lifeguard looked back at him with murder in his eyes as he said, “Shut-the-fuck-up! You’re both lucky you didn’t drown!” We just looked at each other, and Jerry said, “Some people can’t take a joke.”
The End
Disclaimer
Although God looked after two foolish drunks in this story, I would not recommend that you test God’s patience.
Thank you for reading my sailing misadventure. Your comments, critiques, and questions are welcome, as always. Hit the Comment button below or email me at roger.beachbum@gmail.com
Please feel free to share my stories with friends, family, or any “drunks and fools” that you might know. Hit the Share button below.
Another good read. Keep em coming.
So I swam across the Ohio river 3 times to my buddy’s river camp in Melbourne ky. The last time my converses shoe lace caught on a log under the water and almost took me down. I kicked my shoes off and swam ashore. God had my back again