Sue’s neurosis hit its pinnacle on day three of charter.

Prior to Sue’s arrival I had just read an article in the National Geographic about “squirrel jumpers.”  As a sailor (or a maid on a boat, whatever you want to call me), this captivatingly article was rather alarming.  Squirrel jumpers are the pirates found off of Indonesia and are given their name because they manage to board large tankers by pole vaulting onto them from a tender using long bamboo sticks.  This isn’t just thievery, they are out to kill if need be in order to pursue their task.  After working two charter seasons in the Caribbean and am currently wrapping up my first season in the Mediterranean, pirating just seems…archaic.  I understand that it does happen but I guessed the odds are like winning the lottery.  After sailing my own sailboat to Central America where my dinghy was stolen from my boat in the middle of the night, I understand that bad things can and do happen on a boat.  But piracy?  It’s not like I’m sailing off the coast of Somalia.

Sue’s neurosis would prove me wrong.

S/Y Club W was circumnavigating Corsica and on the third night of charter Captain Juan rocked out of bed to check the anchor.  He found Sue sitting in the cockpit and she frantically pounced on my captain.  Sue had apparently heard a noise, a bump, the generator stalling, or a wake hitting the hull of the boat.  Whatever it was, Sue was convinced that we had been boarded by pirates, that there were actual pirates on the boat.  Later, when Juan was telling me and Chef Vanessa the account, I wondered if Sue also thought the pirates had peg legs and eye patches, long hair and bad hygiene.  Juan would find Sue in the cockpit in the middle of the night fretting over pirates a total of three times while on the boat for a mere week.

I finally lost my patience with Sue’s pirate fantasies while we were docked in a very small and very sheltered marina.  Sue was planning to set foot off the boat for the first time on a stroll and interrogated me as to whether or not I would be staying on the boat as Juan and Vanessa were out provisioning.  Yes, I informed her, I’d be on the boat cleaning or plucking my eyebrows if I became tired of tiding.  Could we lock the hatches, she asked.  What?  What the?  I didn’t even know if the hatches locked or not.  Her passports were in her room and she would hate for them to be stolen by drunken pirates with dank armpits.  Was this woman really going to make me get up to lock the hatches?  Couldn’t she figure out how to do it if I had to?  Why are rich people so incredibly incompetent sometimes?  I really didn’t want to get up, to move my exhausted body, so I tried to talk her out of the idea.

“Sue, I can promise you that I think you are insane and I’d like to wrap you up in a cozy little straight jacket and check you into a mental institution,” I said while I exhaled a plume of cigarette smoke in her direction.

That’s what I wanted to say but it came out instead as an insincere condolence.

“Sue, I can promise you that there are no pirates here and I will be on the boat and nothing is going to happen.  Go for a stroll and stretch your legs.”

But she looked so pathetically worried and begged me again to lock the hatches.  In my lame endeavor to pacify her I locked two of the fourteen hatches.  I was surprised to discover that they did lock.  Sue grudgingly set off for her stroll only to return in five short minutes with an excuse complaining that it was too hot.  Sure, I thought, stay here with me and we’ll fend off the pirates together—our combined weight of 200 pounds is bound to kick some pirate ass.

When Sue left at the end of the week the crew could not stop laughing at Sue’s asinine obsession.  We stopped laughing however, when two days later Vanessa’s mother called to inform us that a luxury charter yacht had been boarded by pirates off of Porto Vecchio in Corsica—only miles away from where we had been docked.  We knew of the boat that had been boarded and it was so wild to think that piracy was still occurring and occurring here in the Med.  Fortunately and thankfully, the crew was not hurt.

I suppose, after laughing at a matter that is really not a laughing matter at all, that I would like to make a formal apology to Sue.

Sorry, Sue.  You were right after all.