My Sailboat Beat Me Up

I know it wasn't what I said at the time but now that I have finally made the decision to split the sheets with my lovely little money pit Felicity Jane I can tell the truth. And maybe somebody else can make her stop her wicked ways.
I used to spend the night on the anchor in a spot just above Columbia City out of the channel on the Oregon side. It is far enough away from the beachfront houses on both sides of the river that I feel like I have a bit of privacy, yet close enough to the main river that if you are feeling lucky and the wind is right you can sail off the hook without even starting the motor. Sometimes.

Scene of the crime
That's Columbia City to the left there the big-ass houses go right down to the water and the fog was coming in and the wind was picking up and it felt like trouble but I was too dumb to know it.

 On morning two summers ago I was up on the bow of Felicity Jane trying desperately to get ahold of the chrome stainless slip shackle on the end of the jib halyard and I lost my grip and it went flying. It only weighs eight ounces, but it is stainless steel  in a shape like a half a set of  brass knuckles tied on  the end of a 35 foot rope and the wind was whipping it all around in crazy 70 ft circles.So there was clumsy me, slipping and sliding like a kid catching a frog in a swamp and this chrome fist-on-a-rope flew way out past the bow and then whipped right back fully blast into my left cheekbone catching me right on the edge of the frame of the left lens of my glasses, short and sharp and just as nasty quick as you please. Hard.

I had a shiner for two weeks like I have not seen in many many years and folks on Trimet and at my AA meetings did double takes all that time and more than one of them wondered, though nobody said so, what  sonofabitch did that to that poor old woman, and what excuse did she make to her friends.