Beat the drum slowly and pass the ginger

In May of 1998, an epidemic ravaged the Whitbread Round the World Race fleet. The disease was seasickness.

On the second day of the short coastwise leg from Ft. Lauderdale to Baltimore, the Whitbread racers ran into a cold front. The collision was-literally-gut-wrenching. The boats were speeding north on a highway of Gulf Stream current moving at 5.2 knots. The cold front was speeding south freighted with 30 knots of wind from the north. The waves spawned by the clash of wind and current were sheer cliffs. Boats dropped off of them so violently that when they hit the bottom of the trough, according to a sailor who was there, "it sounded like breaking glass in a car accident." On every boat, crewmembers were rendered barely functional by the miserable symptoms of the sailor's curse. This was remarkable.

Remarkable because those sailors should have had cast iron stomachs. After all, they had sailed more than 20,000 miles-in the Roaring 40s and Furious 50s, around Cape Horn, through the Southern Ocean. They were, as one of the Whitbread physicians put it, "habituated" to the oftentimes violent motion of the ocean. Yet they were sick as dogs for much of the 870-mile sprint to Baltimore.

Which begs the question: Why has medical science forsaken us? Reports of the conquest of all manner of dread diseases are regular fare on the nightly news. There's even talk of a cure for the common cold, for crying out loud. But the only cure seasick sailors can depend on is the one Adm. Horatio Nelson prescribed more than two centuries ago: Sit under a tree. It works every time, but has the unfortunate side effect of ruling out sailing.

Poor Nelson. As a chronic seasickness sufferer, he dreamed of a dotage spent under English trees, but died at sea. The cause of death, it should be noted, was a French musket ball, not seasickness. About the best thing that can be said about the malady is that it is rarely fatal. On the other hand, it is also said that it produces such profound misery that some victims wish for death. It has plagued sailors since the beginning of sailing-not for nothing is nausea derived from the Greek word for ship, naus. It causes such suffering that victims have been awarded a patron saint, an Italian named Eramus, who fittingly is also the patron of navigators and people afflicted with abdominal pains. (Also of interest to sailors, his nickname was Elmo, and it is he who St. Elmo's fire is named after.)

Praying to St. Eramus/Elmo might be a better seasickness remedy than some of the nostrums now available, which are numerous if not especially effective. Some of the stricken Whitbread sailors took injections of prochlorperazine, one of a class of powerful drugs that have some effect on motion sickness. Still, what cured most of them was leaving the Gulf Stream and sailing into the comparatively placid waters of Chesapeake Bay.

In the drug category, the scopolamine patch, that badge of the lee rail brotherhood worn behind the ear, is popular and, according to users, helpful in staving off the dreaded avocado complexion in moderately rough conditions. The buzzword on the anti-seasickness front, though, is "noninvasive"-meaning gentle palliatives free of side effects. Like ginger. Someone, perhaps Confucius, who is said to have ingested the plant prodigiously, started the rumor that ginger prevents seasickness. Sufferers with a bent toward natural remedies can feel good about taking ginger in candy, tea or tablets. The problem is, they don't feel good for very long on the rolling sea. Ginger is supposed to have other benefits, such as relieving muscle pain and stimulating circulation, but people who take it for seasickness probably can't keep it down long enough to notice.

Nothing is less invasive than a remedy that doesn't invade the body at all, which helps account for the popularity of wristbands. These attempt to combat seasickness by putting pressure on a specific point on the underside of the wrist. Some users say they work. The temptation is to think their effect is psychological. Manufacturers and true believers say it's acupressure.

For those who find that wrist remedy too simple and cheap to be credible, there's a gizmo that fits on the wrist and emits small electrical shocks that are advertised to quell queasiness. It looks like a big watch on the order of those hockey puck-size affairs that combine various time-keeping functions with a barometer and even a GPS receiver. Add an anti-seasickness shocking device to one of those, and you'd have a toy no teched-out sailor could resist.

For a low tech remedy, you can always turn to the one Leif Ericson used. If you've seen any Viking movies, you know there's usually a fellow in regulation helmet, horns and blond beard beating a drum on Viking ships. His job is to keep Viking sailors from hurling. This is important work because hanging pathetically over the lee rail would ruin the image of fearsome warriors bent on rape and pillage. I'm not making this up. Actually, it was made up by the maker of an anti-seasickness audio tape. The company claims Vikings didn't get seasick. I question this-what self-respecting Viking would admit to tossing his cookies? But anyway, the marketing spin goes that the rhythm of the drum desensitized the vestibular nerve of the inner ear. So when frequencies similar to those of Viking drums are combined on a tape with soothing music and heard through headphones, seasickness is prevented. Personally, I'd rather hear the drum without the elevator music. If seasickness ever gets to be a problem on my boat, I think I'll put a Viking drumbeat CD on the stereo and turn up the cockpit speakers. Or hire a Norwegian drummer.

Here's a better way to beat seasickness: Get old. Peter Harken, sailing hardware magnate, iceboater, occasional deep water sailor and more or less a contemporary of mine, says aging cured him. I've noticed the same thing. Pressed into sailing soon after mastering toddling, I pretty much puked my way through my seagoing childhood and adolescence. Now it's been years since I've been laid low by mal de mer. The last time, interestingly, occurred in the same place the Whitbread sailors were afflicted, in the chaotic seas of the Gulf Stream in a blow.

The misery was mitigated some by the knowledge that I was in good company. My mates, having recently completed a record-setting Cape Horn passage, were thoroughly habituated, but they were as green as I. We couldn't talk much in the din of the wind and wave-swept cockpit, but I'm pretty sure we were all thinking of the same thing-sitting under a tree.