Читать книгу Little Ship of Fools. Sixteen Rowers, One Improbable Boat, Seven Tumultuous Weeks on the Atlantic онлайн

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And now of course food. And more food. And bedding. And clothing. And two more people than we had had aboard at Shelter Island.

IF STEVE WAS aghast over the weight of food, he was dismayed tenfold by the arrival on January 6th, just five days before departure, of Margaret Bowling, the young Tasmanian woman who had rowed the Atlantic a couple of years earlier and to whom Angela had given first mate’s status specifically for the experience she would bring in the areas of navigation, weather awareness, charting, and so on. She would also, it was assumed, bring moral support to Angela in her attempts to direct a crew not one of whose members had rowed an ocean or rowed even a hundred miles out on one.

Unfortunately, Margaret did not have commensurate experience in handling human beings—at least those of the sort that had signed on with Big Blue. While I had my differences with her, especially over her damnable habit of telling people what to do when no telling was necessary, I eventually came to an understanding of sorts with her and found her variously exasperating, vulnerable, somewhat lonely, and perhaps a trifle nuts, although no more so than a few others aboard the boat, including myself.