{"id":88,"date":"2007-09-27T21:45:27","date_gmt":"2007-09-27T21:45:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/archive.capefarewell.com\/voyage5\/2007\/09\/27\/the-white-horses-of-the-north\/"},"modified":"2007-10-17T16:10:25","modified_gmt":"2007-10-17T16:10:25","slug":"the-white-horses-of-the-north","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.capefarewell.com\/voyage5\/2007\/09\/the-white-horses-of-the-north\/","title":{"rendered":"The White Horses of the North"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Sickness arrives. It has been ushered into the Noorderlicht by white horses galloping across the sea.<\/p>\n<p>She&#8217;s a salty sea and an unforgiving one. Every swell pitches the boat into a violent two-stroke rise and fall. A pattern emerges&#8211;heavy tilt to the starboard, snap back to vertical-but while your body attempts to learn this new gravity, the rhythm is disrupted, punctuated by an irregular swell or as the ship&#8217;s course slips from true (which happens aplenty with our amateur helmspeople). It&#8217;s a scene that&#8217;s part slapstick comedy and part poorly produced disaster flick. Glasses careen through the Noorderlicht&#8217;s upstairs salon, bodies flop, benches overturn. A bell hanging above the bar shows us hanging about 25-degrees from horizontal. At times (check that-most of the time) it feels like an amusement park ride that doesn&#8217;t end.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve managed to avoid the fate of many of my companions. Despite the persistent low-grade threat of ill that sits in my gut (much worse when in the boat&#8217;s lower interior level), I haven&#8217;t succumbed to any real high-grade sickness. I don&#8217;t know whether to credit the copious consumption of raw ginger, my cabin&#8217;s fortunate position towards the middle of the boat (meaning a mere 10 foot vertical drop between swells rather than the 20 foot or so plummet felt by those in cabins towards the bow), or simply good fortune and lucky genetics.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Still, the day that will hopefully prove the trip&#8217;s most violent has provided us (well, those of us who&#8217;ve emerged from our cabins to commiserate) with plentiful laughs and, no doubt, a lifetime of memories. I even managed to film some video that should prove a youtube hit. Spirits remain high with the walking wounded, or &#8220;stumbling bruised&#8221; might be a more accurate description, as I think we&#8217;ve all collected a body full of bangs, and the &#8220;drop and slide&#8221; across the floor has become a familiar and practiced maneuver. We&#8217;ve also found some fun in gravity games, tossing one another fruit across the salon and watching its twisted trajectory. (Oftentimes botching the reception.) It&#8217;s the simple things now that bring the best stimulation.<\/p>\n<p>Wishing my parents a very happy hello. hi Ma, hi Dad! Remember saying how jealous you were of this trip? Well you needn&#8217;t be envious of this seaward stretch!<\/p>\n<p>Representative quote of the day: &#8220;That was my moment of elation.&#8221; &#8211;Matt on singing Dire Straits while steering the ship a mere 5 minutes after &#8220;having a sick&#8221; over the boat&#8217;s side.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sickness arrives. It has been ushered into the Noorderlicht by white horses galloping across the sea. She&#8217;s a salty sea and an unforgiving one. Every swell pitches the boat into a violent two-stroke rise and fall. A pattern emerges&#8211;heavy tilt to the starboard, snap back to vertical-but while your body attempts to learn this new [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17],"tags":[],"geo":{"latitude":73.9499969,"longitude":-6.4355559,"description":null},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.capefarewell.com\/voyage5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.capefarewell.com\/voyage5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.capefarewell.com\/voyage5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.capefarewell.com\/voyage5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.capefarewell.com\/voyage5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.capefarewell.com\/voyage5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.capefarewell.com\/voyage5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.capefarewell.com\/voyage5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.capefarewell.com\/voyage5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}