Ambassador Story
21 April 2017

Why sailing is better than anything else on this planet

“Even better than sleeping you might ask? Yep, yes, yepparoo.

And you’ll get plenty of one and not quite enough of the other on the voyage too.

I realised as I was trying to convince a bunch of very tired, post bike-hike weekend camp Scouts a few weeks ago that my favourite memory of the trip had very much to do with sleep. We had morning watch, 4am-8am, and waking up at 3:45am that morning that was probably the hardest thing I’d ever done, ever, in my whole life. I loved my peeps, but honestly in that moment I wanted to let them all down and go back to sleep with the rocking of the boat, and dream about waking up much, much later for coffee and toast on the deck, to wave at the team on watch climbing the mast, and join Billy and Ham playing ninja, and giggle at Adam throwing shade and loving it, and gossip with the girls about life back on shore, and definitely, definitely not get out of bed before 10. Obviously it was not smart to say all this to sleep deprived Scouts, but I’m not the smartest.

I am however the bravest, and so I did in fact get out of my bed very nobly and selflessly, and go up on watch. My only words for the best part of an hour were probably ‘shhh, stop, it’s too early’.

This sounds awful, right? Why would this be the first thing I think of, the most vivid memory I have of the voyage? There were so, so many other actually fun times on the boat (there were very hard times too, all part of the growing experience etc etc., but that’s not the point of this particular post). We had rave parties in the mess hall; we stitched up Horto, giving him a resounding round of applause every single time he exited the engine room, which he got super sick of on the day the right propellor failed and he spent the best part of 24 hours going in and out of that room; I totally kicked butt at ropes races; we successfully sailed through a 50knot gale coming out of the wildest part of Tasmania’s coastline Port Davey on our Command day; at one point we tied up the crew and threw a full on mutiny. Honestly the list goes on.

So riddle me this, what was it about that morning? The sun rose, like it did every morning, and it was beautiful. My team sat around me, someone helming, someone navigating, someone scouting, someone spewing, same as every watch. Dolphins appeared, Adam saw them first, they were magical for a while and then they left. Nothing that different, nothing that special, just another typical day of sailing. If I could go back for just one hour, though, that’s the hour I would choose to have again.

I think it was just that, I was there to see it.

Don’t miss it.”

Phoebe Imms