Mal de Mer

At 3.45am, from Peel breakwater, I could hear the wind, and through the faint sodium street lights, I noticed sizable waves collapsing onto the beach. The human psyche is a strange and mysterious thing because I already felt sick; I was still sitting in my car. I washed two sea sickness tablets down with half a can of Red Bull, checked the BBC weather forecast on my iPhone one last time, and headed down to the Genisis.

I’d packed the makings of bacon butties; fresh baps and two packs of thick, smoked bacon – I didn’t go anywhere near it all day. The only food to pass my lips over 10-hours was a buttered roll and a chocolate bar (my theory is that if you know you’re going to be sick, you should eat something that tastes as good coming up as it does going down. It works). Good old mal de mer had me debilitated for most of the day, either lying prone in the corner of the galley or bent over the side of the boat like a pissed-up Humpty Dumpty.