Blue Water Sailing and Neurosurgery: A Natural Fit? “Uma vida só se vive”

Abstract

n the cold gray light before dawn, my wife and I were 120 nautical miles south of Madagascar in the Southern Ocean. IWe had spent a sleepless and frightening night fighting a south-westerly gale with 45-knot winds, but the constant roaring grayness and windblown spume seemed to be receding with the morning light.suddenly we were engulfed by a huge rumbling noise like a jetliner passing right overhead.and in a few seconds, our home-built, 12-ton steel sailboat was hoisted 40 feet upward, rolled over, and dropped onto the cabin top in a sickening 360degree rollover. We were flung around inside the small cabin like rag dolls in a washing machine, along with a lot of sea water and our possessions. When I opened the hatch to look around, walls of gray water towered up 50 feet or more above the boat, topped by terrifying foaming, tumbling, white breaking wave tops. The boat was miraculously intact, but we’d lost all electronics and the storm trysail. We turned and ran downwind, hand steering, careening down the giant waves for 12 hours without a break, surfing the crests to avoid another knock down. The Southern Ocean is an unforgiving place, for novices. Maybe parallels can be drawn to that first intraoperative aneurysm rupture, after residency.instant action is needed, and life is in the balance. Since that memorable “maiden voyage,” we have been enormously privileged to sail more than 17,000 blue water miles in 3 oceans, from the beautiful, subarctic Outer Hebrides in Northern Scotland, across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, the Bahamas (Figures 1 and 2), and the peaceful anchorages of the Chesapeake Bay. Thanks to wonderful neurosurgical colleagues, it has been possible to integrate these blue water experiences with a full and demanding neurosurgical life. Our children were conceived at sea, and textbooks were edited in the mid Atlantic.