Ann's Blog
Grenada:
February 1, 2010
Waiting for the Sea to Calm
We thought we’d be in Carriacou by now; instead, we’re still at anchor in Grenada, and a check of today’s 
forecast tells us we’ll be here easily for a few more days. Carriacou, the next island north (it’s part of the same country), is just 35 miles from our current anchorage. But I know from queasy experience that when the wind and sea are up, the second half of the trip – once we’re out of the lee of Grenada – is stomach-churning nasty, and that Tyrrel Bay (Carriacou’s main cruiser anchorage) can be miserable when the wind blows hard from north of east and a north swell rolls down….as it is currently doing.
Sure, I have my drugs of choice, with Stugeron my current favorite. (It’s not available in the US and Canada; my stash is from Bermuda and the DR.) But in my experience, seasickness drugs aren’t infallible, and they all seem to have one or more unpleasant side effects – from making the crew dopey and useless, to knocking her out cold, to leaving her cranky and with a thumping headache. So I’m always on the lookout for other ways of avoiding or curing this malady beyond waiting for the weather to improve or (as the old saying goes) sitting on the shady side of an old brick church in the country.
Which is why I leapt on a tiny book with a bilious-green cover that I discovered at the Nautical Mind Bookstore on my recent trip to Toronto: Heave Ho!, it’s called, and the back cover describes it as a “delightfully macabre little volume.” It consists of 93 pages of quotations from doctors, philosophers, scientists, and writers about seasickness, arranged in five sections: “A Peculiar Affliction,” “Theories as to Cause,” “Psychological Effects,” “Etiquette and Good Practice,” and (my favorite part) “Opium and Other Remedies.”
And so I learned about a 19th-century recommendation for avoiding mal de mer that involved beating the yolks of two raw eggs with an equal amount of brandy and swallowing a teaspoonful every 10 minutes – a remedy that I’m sure would have entirely the opposite effect on me. So too a doctor’s suggestion from a 1909 Scientific American supplement: “Take a fish that has been in the stomach of another fish, cook it, season with pepper, and eat it as you go on board.” Eee-yuck.
More palatable (though equally ineffective, I’m sure) is the 12th-century advice from the medical monks of Salerno: “The sea will not cause nausea in anyone who has drunk a mixture of wine beforehand. A 1927 tome, on the other hand, advised that no alcohol should be drunk – except Champagne.
Others experts advise a pint of beer, ale, or porter taken in six to eight doses at 10-minute intervals (1890); two-to-four eggs boiled as hard as possible (1846); large doses of ammonia with opium (1838, in the respected British medical journal The Lancet); and a wineglass half full of vinegar and salt (again The Lancet, in 1842).
If those don’t do the trick, you can always try keeping your abdominal muscles in a state of almost continuous contraction (The Lancet, 1881) or wearing a tight-fitting (to the point of discomfort) undergarment of strong silk (How to Travel, 1887).
Thanks anyway. I think I’ll just wait for the wind and seas to lay down a little.
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