Morgan Hayes Facebook ad: “5,000 Americans Die From This Every Year”

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My wife couldn't undo her own life jacket when we finally got back to the dock in Bayfield. Her fingers wouldn't close. We had been caught in rough weather coming back from the Apostle Islands, and by the time I tied off the lines, she was just standing in the cockpit with her hands jammed up in her armpits, shaking so hard she couldn't work the buckle. I had to do it for her. She didn't say a word. That scared me more than the crossing did. We sail a Catalina 34 out of Bayfield. Have for eleven years now. Bought her the spring after I retired from the school district in Ashland. Thirty-two years of high school math. My wife taught English down the hall for twenty-six of them. We spent most of our marriage talking about getting a boat, and when I finally stopped teaching, she looked at me across the kitchen table and said, so are we buying that boat or just talking about it until we die? We bought the boat. She is not a small thing. Thirty-four feet, nine thousand pounds, a full galley below and a V-berth up forward that fits the two of us if neither one rolls over. We named her Second Act and we have taken her all over Superior. Madeline Island. Stockton. Sand Island when the weather cooperates. We have been out in everything from dead calm to the kind of afternoon where the waves are coming over the rail and you are asking yourself why this seemed like a good idea at the dock. We are not doing coastal races or beer can races on Wednesday nights. We are two retired people who like being on the water when the light hits the cliffs right. The second weekend of September this year, we took her out to the Apostles for what we figured would be one of the last good runs of the season. Forecast looked clean. I checked the Windy app that morning and saw a cold front moving through late Sunday. Told my wife we would be back at the marina by early afternoon. Plenty of time. We anchored off Stockton Island Saturday night. Grilled bratwurst in the cockpit and ate them with our feet up on the coaming while the sun went down behind the tree line. It was one of those evenings where the water goes flat and the only sound is the anchor chain settling, and neither of you says much because there is nothing to add. Sunday morning the barometric pressure had already started dropping. I noticed it on the bulkhead gauge while I made coffee. Should have paid more attention. The sky was that flat gray that does not commit to anything, and the wind had already started to shift. We pulled the hook around nine and pointed south for Bayfield. About twelve miles. Maybe three hours of easy motoring with the sails up for steadiness. The water was still manageable, a light chop with the wind on the beam, nothing to think twice about. I had my Grundens bibs on over a fleece. My wife had layered a cotton long sleeve under her rain gear, which she always does, which I have told her not to do more times than I can count. Cotton holds water. She knows that. She does it anyway because she says the synthetic stuff makes her itch. About forty-five minutes out, the wind shifted hard from the northwest. Came in faster than the forecast had it. The water went from that light chop to three and four foot rollers inside of maybe ten minutes, and the spray was coming over the bow every time we dropped into a trough. I told her to go below. She said she was fine. Then the engine quit. Just stopped. No cough, no sputter. One second it was running, the next it was dead quiet except for the water and the wind. I knew what it was the moment it happened. The raw water impeller. It cools the engine by pulling lake water through a pump, and when the rubber vanes wear down, the flow stops and the engine overheats and shuts itself off. I had noticed the telltale dripping slower than usual back in August. Told myself I would swap it out before our next trip. The kit was $48. I had it in my cart for three weeks and never hit the button. Forty-eight dollars. I still think about that. Without the engine we were sailing. Which would be fine on a calm July afternoon, but this was building seas with a cold front behind them and the temperature dropping fast. The water up there runs about forty-eight degrees in September. Cold water. The air was maybe fifty-two and falling. That kind of wet cold goes through you faster than a January morning on land because the wind never stops and nothing you are wearing ever dries. You do not realize how far your body temperature has dropped until you try to use your hands and they do not do what you expect. I got the main reefed down. Single slab. It took me longer than it should have because I was trying to keep the bow into the rollers while I worked the lines at the mast, and my wife was on the tiller in real weather for the first time. She did fine. But she was soaked through by the time I got back to the cockpit. The spray had been hitting her full on, and the cotton under her rain gear was working against her now, holding cold water right against her skin. We were maybe nine miles from the breakwater. In a good breeze on a clean heading, that is two hours. But we were beating into it at an angle, making maybe three knots over ground, and Bayfield kept not getting closer. I tried the engine two more times. Nothing. Not even a catch. After about an hour I sent her below to the V-berth. Thought she could warm up out of the wind and the spray. But the bedding was damp. One of the forward hatches had a slow drip I also had not fixed, and the condensation from the previous night had done the rest. Everything down there was cold and clammy. She was below maybe twenty minutes before she came back up looking white and told me she could not take the pitching. I lit the galley stove. It put out some warmth in the cabin, but with the companionway open so she could sit in the cockpit and still get some of it, the wind just pulled the heat straight out. Like trying to warm a room with the windows open. So she sat there. For the next two hours she sat in the cockpit in wet cotton under wet rain gear, in the spray, with the air in the mid forties and the wind steady out of the northwest. I could see her shaking from the tiller. Not the quick shivering you do when you step outside in December. The deep, slow kind that comes from somewhere inside. And there was nothing I could do about it except keep the bow pointed at Bayfield and try to get another half knot out of the sails. She stopped talking about an hour in. I asked her questions to keep her engaged. She answered, but shorter and shorter. By the time we rounded the breakwater and I could see the marina, she was just looking at her hands like they belonged to somebody else. I got us docked. A guy on the pier saw something was wrong and grabbed the lines. I went to help my wife out of the cockpit and she was standing there, shaking, pulling at the buckle of her life jacket with the heels of her hands. Her fingers were white and stiff and would not close around it. I undid it for her. Got her to the truck. Turned the heat all the way up. She sat there for fifteen minutes before she said her first full sentence, which was, I do not want to talk about it. She was fine. Physically, she was fine. No hospital, no frostbite. Just cold in a way that takes something out of you and does not give it all back right away. She wore a sweatshirt around the house for three days straight, even sleeping in it. But I could not stop thinking about what would have happened if we had been farther out. If the wind had died instead of held. If it had been late October instead of September, and the water was forty degrees instead of forty-eight. If she had gone in. I looked it up afterward. CDC researchers found that emergency rooms across the country averaged about 1,560 visits a year just for hypothermia and cold exposure. That is not counting anyone who never made it to an ER. And the thing that stayed with me was that none of those people woke up that morning expecting it. They were on a boat. At a job site. On a trail. Doing regular things on a day that turned. I replaced the impeller the following Monday. Drove to the chandlery in Washburn and bought the kit. $48. Had the old one out and the new one seated in twelve minutes with a screwdriver and a pair of needle-nose pliers. The kind of job you put off because it is easy and small and you figure there is always time. Then I went looking for what else I should have had on the boat. Because the blankets we had below were useless once they were damp, and the stove was useless with the companionway open, and the life jackets keep you floating but they do not keep you warm. That is when I found the thing from MyTacticalPromos. It is a sleeping bag. Not a sheet, not one of those flimsy mylar wraps that tear on the first pull. A full bag, sealed, that you climb inside and close around yourself. The material is something NASA developed in 1964 for lining the suits astronauts wore in space. A polyethylene layer that reflects ninety-five percent of your own body heat right back to you instead of letting the wind take it. It does not make heat. Your body does that part. It just keeps the warmth where it belongs. The whole thing folds into a pouch smaller than my fist. You use it, fold it back up, put it away. When my wife read the specs she looked at me and said, this thing weighs less than a soda can? Four point two ounces. Then she saw the dimensions and said, seven feet by three feet, you could actually fit in that. Coming from her, that is about as close to impressed as it gets. I bought five. One for the cockpit locker on Second Act. One in my truck. One in her car. One in the house by the back door. One in my hunting pack. They run $25.99 each bag when you buy five. One bag alone is $49 retail. That is less than the impeller kit I sat on for three weeks while my wife shivered in a cockpit because I had not gotten around to a twelve-minute job. They come with a month to return it. Over 200,000 customers have already ordered from MyTacticalPromos, which I did not know until I looked them up, but it made me feel less like I was rolling the dice on something I found online. I am not writing this to sell anybody anything. I am writing it because my wife sat in that cockpit for three hours and I handed her blankets and lit stoves and none of it worked. And the one thing that would have worked weighs less than a can of pop and fits in a jacket pocket, and I did not have it because I did not know it existed. If you have a boat, you have been in heavy weather you did not expect. You know what that first gust feels like when the forecast was wrong. If you have a car, you have sat in it somewhere cold, waiting for a tow or a jump or just for the road to clear. If you have a house, the power has gone out in January and you have stood in the kitchen listening to the furnace not running, wondering how long. You know what your version of that afternoon looks like. Everything is under this post. The bag fits in your pocket. Your call. EDITED TO ADD: My wife went back out on the boat the following weekend. I did not ask her to. She got up Saturday morning, checked the forecast herself, packed the bag I had put in the cockpit locker, and said we have maybe three good weekends left. We motored out to Sand Island and back without a single problem. She wore a synthetic base layer the whole day and did not once complain about the itch. She also zip tied a spare impeller kit to the bulkhead next to the engine compartment. Did not mention it. Just did it. That is her way of telling you she has forgiven you but would like you to remember why. P.S. Last week I found the bag from her car sitting on her nightstand next to her reading glasses, still in the pouch. I did not ask her why she moved it. Some things you just notice and leave alone. If you have somebody who would sit in a cockpit for three hours soaking wet and not say a word about it, everything is under this post. They will not be mad about a four ounce bag showing up in their glovebox one morning.

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familysafetytoday.com

5,000 Americans Die From This Every Year

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