Tuesday, April 07, 2009

18 Reasons Why I Will Never Sail in the Volvo Ocean Race

Sailing is fun. I do it for fun anyway. It's meant to be fun. Isn't it?

OK, occasionally it's not fun. Such as the times when I do something stupid and hurt myself... like the time I almost chopped my finger off.

But the dudes racing in something called the Volvo Ocean Race have taken "doing it for fun" to a whole new level. According to this medical update from the race website, the chappies sailing in this extravaganza are having an extraordinary number of cases of "injured while having fun". Here is just a sample of the fun they have had so far...

  1. Kettle burn
  2. Kidney infection
  3. Two broken ribs
  4. Nine mouth ulcers
  5. Mashed thumbnail
  6. Prolapsed disc in back
  7. Head slammed by boom
  8. Three cases of seasickness
  9. Torn medial meniscus in knee
  10. Mouth ulcer caused by a bitten lip
  11. Grotesquely mangled and bloodied index finger
  12. Fifty nine cases of infected skin and sores
  13. Torn anterior cruciate ligament
  14. Seven head or face injuries
  15. Five fungal infections
  16. Torn buttock muscle
  17. Knee infection
  18. Haemorrhoids

Way too much fun for me.

I will never do the Volvo Ocean Race. I may have #11 but I don't want #18 thanks very much.

Until the next time... have fun!

9 comments:

Mal Kiely [Lancelots Pram] said...

Acquiring No. 18 out sailing is "Hardcore racing! The rest of us must be pure amateurs in comparison! heh heh.

Anonymous said...

From Steve in Baltimore

I forget which magazine I saw pictures of the crewmen practising stitching lacerations on pigs' feet.

Fun, fun, fun.

(although if I get healthier than I am now, a Bermuda race sounds good)

bonnie said...

Wow. All KINDS of fun.

Litoralis said...

Those injuries don't sound too unusual. Just about what you expect when you put a kitchen and a toilet in the same damp room with 11 men and then shake it around a lot for a few months.

tillerman said...

What? They have a toilet and a kitchen? Next thing you will be telling me they take a little nap when they're feeling tired and have a medic on board to patch up their cuts and massage their "torn buttock muscles".

Carol Anne said...

Man, the stuff I miss because my Spanish isn't as good as it could be. All I know is somebody had a birthday last week, and the week before, somebody got lucky enough in provisioning to get a big load of queso Parmegiano Reggiano.

Still, a lot of these kinds of things occur on shore anyway, and if you're going to get hemorrhoids, isn't it better to get them while having fun than while doing drudge work?

Anonymous said...

I did a race about ten days after having surgery for #18 once. And that was before I had padded shorts.

O Docker said...

Congrats! All of those pains in the butt have landed you on Scuttlebutt

Tillerman said...

Yeah O'D. I saw that. They kind of muffed my punchline by omitting the numbers on the list but, hey, you can't have everything.

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