An induced coma and broken bones can’t stop Marsali from sailing... next summer
Living with the sea
Marsali Taylor sails an Offshore 8M, Karima S. She’s a dinghy instructor and author of The Shetland Sailing Mysteries starring liveaboard sleuth, Cass Lynch.
This summer my sailing was cut short by a bizarre starting-line accident. I was hit by a boat. It was at the Brae Regatta in July, and I was being foredeck monkey and jib wrestler aboard my friends’ Contessa 32, Cynara of Arne.
It was a tight start-line, and the fleet had just stormed across it. There was serious luffing going on below us so I was by the mast, ready for a fast tack, when there was a terrific bang and a dreadful pain in my chest that squashed me against Cynara’s mast–and then I realised a white bow was slipping back from me, taking a chunk of Cynara with it. Only my lifejacket strap caught in the mast was holding me upright.
I managed to say to John, my fellow foredeck crew, that I was injured, that they’d need to call an ambulance, and he laid me down on the deck.
My fellow sailors were stars. They dealt so calmly with the situation–all those sailing instructor First Aid courses had kicked in. John kept speaking cheerfully to me (with the occasional comment to the others about how grey I was) and Hughie got Cynara out of the confusion and headed for the pontoon. It being regatta day, half of Brae was there already, including a nurse and a doctor who stayed with me till the ambulance arrived and a blessed shot of morphine took the pain away as they cut off my sailing clothes.
After that, according to Philip, hastily fetched from a peaceful day’s composing at home in Aith, I was a Major Emergency: briefly stabilised in the Lerwick hospital, then air ambulance to Aberdeen, where I lay unconscious for two weeks.
I was having more fun than Philip and my daughter Marnie, waiting anxiously by my bed, warned that I might not make it at all. I was aware that I’d been hurt, but my brain knew what I should have been doing: plane to Oslo, meeting my friend Ellen, joining the Sørlandet in Frederikstadt and sailing to Lerwick, the tall ships party and then my grandchildren visiting. In my head, I stood my watches, enjoyed festivities on Lerwick pier and rode Icelandic ponies with my granddaughter Ava. Every so often a nurse hologram would waver across my vision–Marnie said I was very good about responding to my name, and it was a big day when I demonstrated I could wiggle my toes–and gradually my green hills and voe dissolved into a series of imaginary hospitals w
