Carl is right, if I started telling you guys the stuff I've been getting away with out there on the ocean all these years, your toes would curl and your jaws would drop!
RRRRRR, mateys, pull up your stool, grab yer grog, and let me tell you about taking my lovely wife to Grand Bahama when we were just starting to date! I think we'd been seeing each other for no more than two months, and I told her I wanted to take her on a "weekend getaway." Well, our weekend came, and we left from Stuart in my handy-dandy Adventure 208 Grady-White (I was doing the Professional Mariner Training at Chapman's School of Seamanship). It was only 3 to 5 as we came out of the inlet, and I blandly told Marianne that the waves would "smooth out into rollers" as we went further out in the stream. The 208 is a hell of a boat, you can dial it in with the trim tabs, autopilot, and GPS for a slow plane in just about anything. Man, we were in just about anything. Marianne wound up standing behind the two chairs in a "jet ski" mode. We had wind steady at 25+, seas 6-10, so I decided to pretend to fish so she wouldn't think anything of it. I was sitting on my ass on the cockpit floor with my feet and toes gripping for dear life as I tossed an artificial over the back on one of my bigger trolling rods. Just about then, a USCG helicopter came zooming up out of nowhere, and hovered no more than 20 feet above the Bimini top. So I just smiled and waved, sitting there on the deck. We finally got to West End, and we pulled in to the marina there to clear customs. The first thing we see is the Coast Guard chopper and crew busy airlifting somebody out of there on a gurney. We never did find out any details on that. Then, just as we were getting ready to leave to go over to Xanadu, some joker off a sportfish comes waking over and says "your wife still talking to you after that crossing?" Man, I almost got away with it, but then Marianne began to decode the conversation and realize that maybe 6-10' seas aren't what everybody else goes out in after all.
Truth is though, she got her initiation done early and the only other time she's ever been unhappy on my boat was the time we did the same thing coming back from Nassau at night. You guessed it, 6-10' seas in the dark! She still gets pissy about that from time to time, until I remind her that SHE INSISTED on being back for a court date Monday morning (she's an attorney)!
