Another fun story from my wayward youth: it involves a shipwreck.
When I was 19, my best friend Bonnie and I were living in New Zealand. We wanted to go on an adventure but didn't have much cash and had already done all the touristy things NZ is famous for.
So we went on findacrew.com and found a captain on the Gold Coast of Australia who needed two crew members to sail to New Zealand.
We flew over and quickly learned he was an icky former marine. But the Mother Sea called to us and we didn't have another way home so we lived on his boat for a month before embarking to New Zealand.
Note: The Tasman Sea is a very dangerous passage that two novice 19-year-olds should definitely not attempt. We didn't know that.
The first 3 days there was no wind so we zigzagged across the Tasman Sea barely making any headway. The stars were insane. The dolphins followed us. The noctiluca still mesmerizes me (stars above us, stars below us).
I made thanksgiving dinner on the sailboat and we ate it under one of the most gorgeous sunsets I've ever seen. Bonnie brought her guitar and sang to me.
Then we hit a big storm. Apparently back then the weather reports weren't super advanced when it came to the Tasman Sea - because we were in the storm before the Australian coastguard could see it on their radar.
It was bad. The first night we tried to reef the mainsail (essentially bring it down so it didn't whip us around as much). The topping lift broke (the thing holding it up). The boom fell less than a foot from my head. Easily could've knocked me over into the abyss or crushed me.
I sat down on the deck stunned and just let the rain and wind swirl around me until Bonnie called me back to the present. We went under only to discover our jib sail was tearing. If you lose both sails in a storm, you destabilize and rollover. Which is very very bad.
AKA: almost assured death. We begged the captain to call the coastguard to come and pick us up. He pushed back that it would cost $10K to come get us. We pushed back that our parents would gladly pay that to keep us alive.
Bonnie's exact words: "my life is worth 10,000 dollars." Didn't matter because it turns out the middle of the Tasman Sea is a kind of no man's land where coast guards don't do rescues (or so the evil captain told us).
So we traded turns watching the jib sail out of a sad, little window. If it tore all the way, our only alternative was to throw out this weird parachute thing - which required going out on deck during a major storm (at this point it was only a few knots below a hurricane).
Which meant a pretty damn good chance of getting thrown over and drowning (we were tied in on deck - but the chances of getting pulled out of the raging ocean during a major storm are slim).
During my shift I cuddled my teddy bear, Mr. Bear and peered out the sad little window and just replayed snapshots of my family over and over again in my head. I'd been living abroad for a few months and my dad and I weren't speaking (he'd cut off my tuition).
I was a ball of anxiety. Could barely breathe. And then I prayed for the first time in years: "God, if you can't calm the storm outside, please calm the storm within me." And it worked. I felt peace. I looked death in the face and accepted that if it was my time, it was my time.
The storm passed. We had no sails so we kind of surfed to this island (Lord Howe Island) a few hours away. The Captain had been such a royal dick the whole time (not to mention literally risking our lives for kicks) that I wasn't speaking to him.
We got to the island. He wouldn't let us off the boat for another night. I would have swam but there were literal sharks circling our boat. The next morning he took us to shore in the dingy and I never got back on that boat or spoke to him again.
We didn't have any $$ (it's an Australian territory and we thought we were going to NZ) - so I called my dad and left this msg: "Daddy, I'm shipwrecked on an island and have no money. Can you help me?" And that's how we started speaking again. He kept that VM for years.
A kindly old couple took us into their home. Bonnie sang for our dinners until Dad wired money shortly thereafter. A local hotel owner took us back to mainland Australia in his tiny little plane. We took trains to the airport and peaced out back to NZ.
I hugged my darling friends there - said goodbye to my beloved land of the long white cloud - and went home to see my family for the first time in months.
All that to say: if we can't calm the storm outside right now, I pray that we calm the storm within us.
