Hmm...
I'm not sure how to take that. I think he meant it in the "you're not a stick in the mud, and seem to like to have fun" type. On the other hand, maybe he meant I'd be a lot more interesting with a couple of stiff belts in me. So I bored him with the story of why I quit drinking in the first place. Take that!
I had been crewing on a J/35 that summer, racing my with good friend and boat pusher Joe Housely. (This was Joe's second J/35, Epidemic, purchased as a rebound from the trauma of selling his first J/35 Contagious. Joe, you see, had a terrible case of the sailing disease, so bad he regularly tried to spread it to other people by being the chief sales guy at the local J/Boats dealer.) Yes, this is the same Joe Housely who years earlier convinced me to squander a large chunk of my newly graduated salary on a J/22, my first true love dJinni.
So anyhow, the sailing season is finished, we've just finished (badly) in the second race on Sunday and are headed to shore. Wind was scarce that day, with the finish mark placed way out on the lake. Nobody was patient enough to ghost back in, so we folded the sails and cranked up the "cast iron spinnaker" and were motoring back in when Joe brought out a bottle of Cuervo Gold 1800. Ah, my old friend Jose. We passed the bottle around the cockpit twice, even his 16-year-old daughter Carrie took a couple of hits off the bottle. No worries about spreading diseases when you're drinking high-quality antiseptics, right?
After the second round, Joe said something to the tune of "we need some real drinks" and led the entire crew below to mix gin and tonics. To my surprise, Carrie went with them. I knew Karen wasn't going to let her drink anymore, and Carrie had a little bit of a crush on me, so I was surprised she left. I found myself standing on the tiny little poop deck at the stern of the boat, leaning against the pulpit rail and steering with my toes, holding the bottle of tequila a little less than half full.
I contemplated Jose for a minute, and then took a good, long swallow. A few more and the bottle was gone. The warmth of the tequila competed with the warmth of the sun. The boat was behaving well, J/35s tend to buck a little while motoring, but we were taking it easy to keep the sound down in the cabin, so I wasn't really paying much attention to the boat or myself or anything else and then...
Splash!
I fell off the back of the boat.
I was feeling no pain.
The water was warm, and it's pretty hard to get very wet in the Great Salt Lake. Really. I just laid back and floated and paddled a bit and got really comfy.
Epidemic motored merrily away, moving much faster than I could possibly swim, even if I was trying. I wasn't.
We were three, maybe three and a half miles out. Antelope Island lay 7 or more nautical miles to the north. Both were well beyond my range, even if I was trying, though it really is hard to drown in the Great Salt Lake. Maybe I would have made it to shore before I got sunburned to death. Probably. But I wasn't trying.
Fortunately, the wind was so light and the surface of the lake so glassy, when the boat started turning of her own accord a few minutes later, Joe got upset with the change in course and bellowed up to ask me why we were turning. When I didn't answer, he sent somebody to check out why. I imagine they were quite surprised to find the cockpit empty, helm hard over, and Epidemic circling back as if to find me on her own.
Whoever it was screamed those famous words "Man Overboard!" bringing the drunken rest of them up onto deck. Joe, calm in a storm even with a few G&Ts in him, realized he could follow the bubble trail from the prop and exhaust, and at least get closer to where I was. Some time later, somebody spotted something in the water (too small to be a whale, to big to be a brine shrimp) that turned out to be me, they motored up, paused, and Joe dropped the swim ladder into the water.
I climbed back into the boat with some reluctance, and probably a bit of staggering, to the universal derision of the rest of the crew, still gripping Jose by the neck. Joe asked how much I had wasted, and I quickly reported "None!" No wonder, huh?
Back on shore, I hosed off the salt, went back to my own little boat, and slumped into the cabin. I was smart enough to realize I wasn't in any condition to drive, so I huddled in my little dJinni and sobered up. Late that night, I woke up with a splitting headache, drove to the nearest place to get some food, and gorged myself on ham sandwiches, ibuprofen, and Mountain Dew, then drove home.
The next night, back at home, my brother asked me where I'd been. We were sharing an apartment in Salt Lake City at the time and it was unusual -- as in never happened before -- for me to stay out all night. I told him about my visit with Jose and the brine shrimp and he opined "You really are a dumbass, aren't you?"
I guess I hadn't really contemplated the enormity of what I'd done before then, but yeah, looking back on it, it was pretty stupid. Falling off a boat miles from shore is no laughing matter, doing it with nobody else on deck even worse. It turned out well not because anybody did anything right, but just because the weather was so benign.
After this little episode, I became much more reluctant to drink to excess, and was never much of a social drinker. In the next year or so, I realized that drinking just didn't fit my life anymore. Giving up drinking was one of the easiest things I ever did.
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