My husband, Rick, gives 110 percent to whatever he does. So, it doesn’t surprise me to hear that he was injured on the SV Spirit of Juno in Barbados. He’s doing the Mount Gay Rum Round Barbados Race with Ondeck sailing. Here is a picture of the rope burn that my husband sustained while sailing.
He didn’t realize that he had a rope burn until the next day. He thought he had a sunburn.
Treat minor cuts with care
So this looks like a pretty minor cut, right?
However, on the water, especially if you are offshore cruising, it’s important to clean wounds and to watch them carefully. I carry oral and topical antibiotics.
We met a cruiser who had to have his leg amputated when a seemingly minor cut became infected. The infection did not go away on it’s own, the local hospital was unable to treat it, and so he lost his leg.
Back to the story about my husband.
How the rope burn happened
Rick will disagree with me, but I know of no one else with his focus or competitive spirit. If he doesn’t injure himself gardening or reading then he just isn’t trying hard enough.
He says that the sail racing is stressful and everyone has a job to do. He is determined to learn to sail competently and focuses on his task – whatever the skipper asks him to do, he does.
One of his jobs is to operate the coffee grinder winches, which are needed to raise and lower the sails. These winches have two handles that sailors rotate round-and-round in a cycling motion.
Another one of his jobs is to stuff the kite sail back into storage. This is how he came to have his rope burn.
As background, the kite sail feels like a heavy tent and takes about 20 minutes to pack away. First, it gets lowered into the saloon. It is hot in the hull, and my husband says he needs to time his movements so that he doesn’t get thrown around the boat, which keels and bumps up and down on the waves.
Keep yer’ limbs away from the lines
On this occasion, the kite sail had just been lowered into the saloon through a hatch, when somehow the halyard line got tangled. Within seconds the halyard ripped the kite sail out of the saloon, back up through the hatch, and sent all the associated lines with it. One of those lines went whizzing by, and took a chunk out of my husband’s leg.
He’s fine. At home, my husband cuts all of our wood by hand. He uses an axe and a chainsaw. There are no splitters involved (Thank god!) He fells his own trees, although sometimes using our minivan. A rope burn is nothing in comparison to some of the things I’ve seen. Fortunately, this rope burn really is, just a flesh wound.
I’ve developed a healthy respect for the lines. On one occasion, I put too little resistance on a winch. I should have put more wraps. Instead, the line pulled out of the winch, and whipped up, hitting me in the face, and knocked the lenses out of my glasses.
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