Sailing terms, y'know.

Four days ago I was sailing on the Atlantic Ocean.

For real.

My mother-in-law and her husband are sailors. They like it so much that ten years ago they sold their perfectly respectable house in a perfectly respectable North Side neighborhood in a very nice Midwestern mid-sized city, and bought a 37-foot catamaran on which to live. They put some of their furniture in storage (his Argentine family heirlooms, and her mother's breakfront), got rid of a lot of the rest of it, sold us their van (we're still driving it) and moved onto a boat. When it was no longer fun for them, they bought a condo in Florida, sold the big boat, went in on a one-third share of a smaller boat, and now they do short sails, like taking 'the kids' out for a day on the open sea.

Part of the deal they make: you must listen to the water-safety spiel, and you must at least attempt to operate the tiller. "Operating the tiller", gentle reader, is codeword for "decide if the boat tips over or not."

I watched while Wondergirl and my Other Equal Half operated the tiller. As an artist and an engineer, respectively, they were very good at it. She could conceptionalize the subtlties in the way the jib-jenny billowed, and how that translated to moving the tiller arm. She could feel the tension, and responded to it absolutely spot-on nearly every time. He understands physics; plus, as an added bonus, he's just plain good at just about everything he tries.

I waited, hoping that my MIL would somehow forget that I was even on the boat (not a completely unreasonable expectation). Finally MIL's husband announced "cheesehead's turn!" I was able to understand what to look for, which way to turn the tiller arm (opposite the way a first impulse tells you to), and was somewhat not hating the feeling of all that power in my hands.

Then a sudden gust blew up, which I was not anticipating, and I got confused, moving in the totally wrong direction. The rails on a sailboat are quite literally the outermost metal railing that run around the deck. To 'bury the rail' is to tip the boat so far over that the rail is underwater. It's a thing that most sailors do at least once, and many do just for fun--just to see how well they can recover.

It was not fun for me. It was scary, but I recovered in time to not flatten the darn thing. Nobody got seriously wet. And later, after we were heading back to harbor I realized that it really had been quite a rush to get that close to real danger, and to recover.

My faithful readers might be thinking, "How is she going to preach that?" (I'm looking at you, Rach.) But for today it is just a really good sailing story, and a sweet, sweet memory.