San Diego. We were to go scuba diving off the islands of San Clemente and Catalina, both situated off the Southern California coast. I’d only known her for a few months
prior to asking her to marry me. She was a flight nurse on the Life Flight team, hired as one of six new flight nurses to staff the third helicopter the hospital had added to its fleet. Soon after meeting her and going on two dinner dates and taking her out on only a one-day sail, I was quickly smitten and immediately drawn to her. During our one and only sailing date she
told me she was saving money to buy a sailboat of her own. She seemed to be everything I was looking for in a woman: smart, sporty, fun, pretty as well as being a top-notch nurse. We seemed to share a common spirit of adventure too. On the morning of our third day after
sailing out of San Diego, while anchored off San Clemente Island, I’d just come out of the water from retrieving the anchor that had become snagged on a rock, making preparation for our onward sail to Catalina. While standing in the dingy next to the boat’s cockpit, drying off, I asked her to marry me. She accepted, and to seal the proposal she leaned over the aft lifeline to give me a kiss, accidentally bumping the stern-mounted barbecue, and spilling sev- eral months of grey charcoal ash over my head and shoulders. After a short civil ceremony in Catalina,
wearing shorts, flip-flops, and sporting great suntans, we made plans for our fu- ture. We’d live on Moali while working together at Life Flight, until we could save enough money to quit our jobs, untie the dock lines and sail off to foreign ports. Then this job in Oman came along allow- ing us to quickly make some real ‘freedom chips,’ the term cruising sailors use for cash. Our plan was to leave Oman one day and return to San Diego, put Moali back into the water, outfit her properly for blue-water sailing, and take off on one huge adventure. Thinking back on it now, I should have
taken that incident with the barbecue as an omen of things to come. Before the very recent and sudden col-
lapse of our marriage I had been very op- timistic about the bright prospects for our
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future here in Oman. At work, I’d been asked by the chief pilot to be an instructor pilot and flight examiner for the helicop- ter-side of the Police Air Wing. It was one of the highest compliments I had ever been paid in my professional career. I felt I was living a charmed life, a life that appeared promising on all fronts. Unfortunately, now looking again at the
damaged aircraft entrusted to me, I realized my personal problems had wreaked havoc upon my professional responsibilities. The charm was broken.
Randy Mains is an author of several books, a public speaker, and a CRM/AMRM Consultant who continues to work in the helicopter industry
after a long career of aviation adventure. He currently serves as Chief CRM/AMRM instructor for Oregon Aero. He may be contacted at
randym@oregonaero.com
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