Salty Podcast #87⛵When Sailing Turns Serious | Sailing the Oceanaire ⛵

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A quiet dinner at anchor turned into the kind of emergency every cruiser dreads. Within hours, pain escalated into a misdiagnosed crisis, a midnight dash to a small clinic, and a fight to secure an air ambulance before pilots timed out and the airport closed at dark. What followed was necrotizing pancreatitis, weeks in U.S. ICUs, and a hard lesson in how evacuation insurance really works when you’re far from home and the paperwork clock is ticking.

We walk through the chain of failures and fixes: why “get me home” coverage matters, what documents medevac teams demand before dispatch, and how to build a grab-and-go packet that lives both on paper and in your phone. We talk costs and realities—$48,000 flights, FAA crew limits, and the bottleneck no one warns you about: securing a receiving hospital bed before wheels up. Then we share the counterweight to crisis—the cruising community that moved the boat across islands, decommissioned her for hurricane season, coordinated vendors, and welcomed us back with open arms and spare parts. If you sail offshore, this is the blueprint for readiness and the proof that people keep you afloat.

Balancing grit with wonder, Renee also shares her Pacific crew passage: the rhythm of a modern catamaran, the Galapagos logistics machine of agents and inspections, and the payoff underwater—hammerheads, sea lions, and reef mantas barrel-feeding beneath the keel. We dig into real numbers for the canal and Galapagos fees, how biosecurity shapes cruising plans, and why meticulous prep unlocks world-class anchorages. Recovery, resilience, and route planning all collide here, from Bequia and Grenada to the Marquesas and back to the yard in Trinidad.

If you care about bluewater safety, medevac realities, community support, and the raw joy that keeps us chasing horizons, this story is for you. Subscribe, share with a cruising friend, and leave a review with your top takeaway or your own emergency-prep tip—we’ll feature the best on a future show.

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SALTY ABANDON: Cap'n Tinsley, Orange Beach, AL:
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Feb-Oct 2015 - 1982 Catalina 25

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