Electroshock Therapy

As it happens salt water is one of the best conductors out there.   I happen to be intimately familiar with this phenomena.

Through the course of a voyage a sailor is sure to get innumerable cuts and scrapes and bruises on his or her hands, arms, legs, and indeed on every square inch of one’s body.  Yup, sailing is not for the weak of heart, delicate flowers, or for those who break easily.  While sailing you don’t even notice all of the injuries you get.  I can’t even begin to count the number of times me or someone else on the crew has looked down and realized they were bleeding profusely from some new open wound.   Nothing terribly serious, just one of the less glamorous parts of the life on the ocean.

A cut here, a nick there; pretty soon you don’t even notice them.  Until a week or so ago.  When it first started Lindsey and I thought the salt water rinse when we were washing the dishes was just getting into the little scrapes on our hands.  It hurt quite a bit, but we chalked it up to the pain of putting salt in an open wound.

About a week into it the captain did the dishes.  You could hear the cries from every corner of the boat.  “Oouucchh!  I just got electrocuted!!” We all came running and found the captain nursing his hurt hands in the galley.  He

Lindsey and I just looked at each other.  We had been getting electroshock therapy every time we had done the dishes for weeks and hadn’t said a word.  The big tough captain’s pained expression that he had been hurt for trying to be helpful was almost comical.  Men.

Electrocution; now there’s an incentive to do the dishes.  You think you tried hard to get out of washing dishes when you were a kid!

We’re still waiting for the shocking saltwater pump on  kitchen sink to be rewired.