Today we had a team bonding session in a beautiful outdoor adventure place. It was sunny. I know these things are supposed to be ghastly but I really enjoyed it. I spent the afternoon on a lake in a small dinghy with my boss. He had never sailed before.  I haven’t sailed in years and years and thought I had forgotten everything I knew. It turned out I remembered a bit and I got increasingly rude to my lovely boss. Conversations tended to go a bit like this:
Me: OK, are you going to turn?
Him: I don’t know what I’m doing.
Me: Neither do I really but we’re catching some wind now. Stay straight.
Him (leaning back and pulling the tiller to him): OK.
Me: JESUS, I said keep the tiller straight, you are going to **** capsize us.
Him (apologetically): Sorry, I keep forgetting I’m holding it.
Me: Further choice words followed by, um, sorry, I was very rude there, I’m an eldest child.
Despite (or quite possibly because of) my shouting, we managed to capsize five times. This is hardly a tribute to our vessel’s captain (that, I think, would be me, the bossy one). As he hauled himself cheerfully out of the water for the fifth time and yanked me in by the life jacket he said happily “we were going really fast there!”
Oh how I will miss this job.
I just had a flashback to the time my husband and I took beginning sailing together. He’d actually been sailing all his life, and just wanted me to learn. Mainly I learned how to be ballast while my husband took it upon himself to race all of the other “beginner” students — who were capsizing left and right1
when i think back to sailing camp experiences in the netherlands at 15, the nature of my memories is entirely different. it involves much swearing, and adolescent posuring, and some furtive underwater groping (possibly on of the reasons we capsized so much)… that was such a loooong time ago.
The
bossy onecaptain should be on the tiller, usually, otherwise you get the shouting and swearing.Btw the eldest child thing is apparently the reason that such Irish female politicians as there are are almost all called Mary.
“sorry I was very rude there, I am an eldest child” – I am *so* going to be using that line.