Interislander: When Waves Attack

The ferry climbs up another wave, hooking everyone's stomachs and pulling them along with it. It finds the sea and continues no problem. The stomachs on the other hand....

It's the premise of all those horror films I hate watching: people in a contained environment become ill, there's no escape and those that haven't caught it have to try and survive on their own. When I'm tricked into watching these films (usually by Tom's protests at having to be scared on his own) I'm always torn between feeling grateful I'm not living those events in real life, and knowing that if that were to happen I would be so dead so quickly I probably wouldn't even be cast as an extra. I'd be one of the numbers that's announced on the news no one's paying attention to as the screen fades from black.

So already, I am ill-equipped to deal with mass illness/zombie apocalypses etc etc. I am the kind of person that panics when I'm in a room with less than 5 people because I would be called on to help in the event of an emergency.

What I'm trying to say is if you were going to create a situation that I would be completely useless in and that would probably form one of my personal Levels of Hell, using my experience on the crossing from the North to the South Island would be a good place to start.

At least the views outside were good...

When the Captain came over the speakers just before we set off, he calmly let everyone know the weather was bad through Cook Strait. This meant that when we reached the open sea, it was going to get choppy. 5 - 6 metre waves, was one thing he mentioned.

I am not a sailor. In fact, I am actually terrified of the sea. I think it is something that should be respected and that is something that can be done from land. So if you had asked me, prior to that journey, whether or not 5-6 metre waves would be a big deal, I would have been utterly clueless as to how to answer. In my head it maybe sounds like a lot? but I struggle to picture heights so I'd just say no and assume that at most, we would mutter "huh, I think that was a wave" every now and again.

THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN A WRONG ANSWER.

I learnt that journey that waves of that height can make a boat feel like it is falling through the air.

I learnt that while my stomach would swoop and turn and do that awesome rollercoaster feeling, everyone else's would assume they had been poisoned and immediately start an evacuation procedure.

I have never seen so many people so ill in all my life. Probably not even in a hospital*. They were lining the walls around the open decking/toilets. All of them crouched on the floor or hanging on to the walls, grey-faced with sick bags in hand. Parents were running to and from the sick bags and grabbing handfuls at a time. It was like a war zone.

When I peeped out from under my eye mask to see how Tom was doing, I found him concentrating on the view out of the window as if his life depended on it; the only colour on his face coming from the stubble lining his chin.

Being a loving girlfriend (read: scared he was going to throw up on us both) I went in search of cabin crew. They were walking around handing out polystyrene cups of ice to all of the seasickness sufferers. I had no idea what else to do other than come back and offer Tom this little cup of frozen water.

"It helps," I said, thinking maybe the crew had just run out of tap water or something and I was being an idiot.

You should know that in the process of going to get this cup of ice, I had to not only step over a puddle of sick, but I had the misfortune of watching a little girl throw up into a sick bag her apparently psychic Dad had produced in the nick of time.

I was in hell, and there was no escape.

The ferry journey takes about 3 hours from start to finish. We were about an hour and a half of the way through by this point. Other than pulling on my eye mask and shoving in my earphones, I was trapped on this ferry until it stopped moving.

I felt like I suddenly connected with every disaster movie I have ever watched.

Obviously I wasn't on a ferry that was about to be full of zombies and I'm clearly not a man, I'm not muscle-y, ex-military, or all of the above. I also didn't have to search desperately for a cure because the sea calmed down as we entered the Sounds about an hour later, and everyone started to feel better.

Maybe Hollywood isn't going to try to buy the rights to this story after all....

I don't think I was the only one who was pleased to step off that ferry that morning, although I might have been the only one left with a full stomach.

Welcome to the South Island, I guess...

*Okay, hospitals probably have more sick people. Maybe a doctors surgery instead.