Bye Bye Cantaloupe, Hello Cold Shock

I’ve always been prone to motion sickness. It runs in my dad’s side of the family. It managed to skip a generation, leap over my dad, and land squarely on my head, while leaving my brother relatively unscathed. Kind of like a terrible barf tornado.

I’ve gotten sick in airplanes, movies in which the camera moved too fast, and of course long car trips. Every summer of my childhood, we drove marathon distances from Omaha, Nebraska to visit grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins in either Alabama or Pennsylvania in our 1980 Ford Fairmont. Every one of those car trips involved projectile vomiting, instigated entirely by me. My brother James was a sympathetic puker. The combination of long distances in the back seat, Brach’s Pick-a-Mix candies, and the overpowering smell of coffee from my dad’s giant thermos made my stomach churn. The first time this happened is forever etched in my memory. I vividly recall looking at the front of my pink t-shirt as semi-digested apples exploded downward. I looked over at James. With a look of horror and disgust I’ve never seen on a two-year old before or since, he quickly followed suit. Sometime later in Iowa, the Ford Fairmont screeched into a gas station with my dad screaming, “I gotta get out of this Puke-Mobile!”

Growing up in a landlocked state, I haven’t had much opportunity to bounce up and down on the ocean. So while I can honestly say I’ve never been seasick, it’s only because the opportunity never presented itself.

To say the weather was a bit choppy the first two days on the water in Baja is like saying that if you poke yourself in the eye with an ice pick, it might hurt a little. When we started out, the skies were sunny and the zephyrs light. We loaded the boats and were out on the water in no time. We’d been blessed with three extremely wonderful, patient, and capable guides, Serena, Caleb, and Edgar to lead the way. We were in tandem kayaks and being the lone, unattached person on the trip, I ended up sharing a kayak with Edgar the first day out. I’d paddled in the rain up in British Columbia, but substantial winds were a novelty for me. We saw ominous looking grey clouds in the distance, but Serena assured us, “It never rains in Baja.”

The further we paddled, the greyer the sky got and the higher the winds blew while Serena continued to let us know that it never rained in Baja and when the sprinkles began coming down, she reassured us, “It’s not raining.”

It never really did pour down rain on us. I’ve always heard that the Inuit have some hundred odd words for different types of snow. Maybe folks from British Columbia have varying degrees of rain.

We weren’t out on the water long enough on the first day to feel the full effects. The second day out, the sun was shining. Unfortunately, the wind hadn’t abated. We were about halfway across the water on our way to the island we would be spending the night on. I’d eaten cantaloupe for breakfast along with something else I can’t recall. As our kayaks pitched on the waves, I could feel breakfast sloshing around in my stomach and was worried about what might happen next when my digestive system presented a much more pressing concern--I had to go. And I had to go RIGHT NOW. I mentioned this to Serena and she said, “Okay, just jump into the water and go.”

This took working up some nerve since I’d never jumped into the middle of the ocean before, but I finally jumped out of the kayak into the sea.

About two months prior, Sea Kayaker magazine ran an article about the dangers of cold shock and swim failure. Deep down I didn’t really think this would happen to me. I was in Mexico and it was eighty degrees outside after all. I will say that once I jumped into the water, my priorities were swiftly redirected. It was like coming across a bathroom at a Cenex gas station in Arkansas and realizing maybe you don’t have to go quite so bad after all. If I hadn’t had someone to help me back in the boat, I don’t know that I would have been able to make it back in at all.

I was grateful to finally be back in the boat and shivering with cold, the source of my unpleasantness changed its point of origin. Pitching around on the choppy water for over two hours had finally taken its toll and half-digested cantaloupe began spewing into the ocean coming from guess who. Poor Caleb, who had been so patient with the flabby abs, chicken-armed woman he was sharing a kayak with, remained so throughout the entire time I spent retching over the side of the boat. He told me about being seasick on a fishing boat off the coast of Alaska. “Oh Jennifer, seasickness is so shitty.”

He continued to paddle while I barfed into the sea. We finally made it to our campsite and I couldn’t have imagined a more idyllic and beautiful place to spend the night. Even in my state of physical and mental misery, I had to appreciate the turquoise water and relatively sheltered beach as we paddled to shore.

I grabbed my dry bag with my clothes and quickly stripped down behind a bush to change. It was another hour and a half before I remembered that I still had to go.

Stay tuned for Part IV: Bees!