I’ll admit to being a card-carrying member of the ...Please Lord, Let Me Live A Boring Life Club. That explains why I pester people with questions when I’m making plans to navigate places I don’t know.
I usually boat alone and I don’t like making quick nav decisions on the fly when in new waters. And I have a bone-fide case of PTSD from a really sketchy experience I had in Milbanke Sound a number of years ago. To this day, I get chills down my spine when I see waves falling over on themselves in any kind of wind.
Backstory: I got stuck in 3 to 4 meter seas for two solid hours. Nobody around and I’d passed the point of no return because the seas were way too large to back-track. It began to dawn on me there was a good chance I would lose the wheelhouse glass and either pitch-pole the boat or swamp...or both.
At one point I blurted out to the Lord: Dude, what ever happened to my paid-in-full membership in the Live a Boring Life Club?
His response: Dude, you decided to leave Klemptu knowing full well there was an ebb tide running full bore out of Finlayson Channel into a south-east blow. What did you expect?
I responded —-yeah but outlook was for 15 - 20 and I thought I’d be good. You ratcheted it up to 30 -35. What’s up with that?
He took the toothpick out of his mouth and looked me in the eye......Dude, you looked like the kind of guy that needed a bit of experience under his belt....it was my way of saying.... slow down