It was another moonless night under sail in the North Atlantic Ocean.
I was below deck in the aft (back) of the yacht putting a trash bag into a locker called the lazarette. As i was just about to climb the ladder out, the boat rolled to Port causing the hatch cover to close down on my right hand. I am not writing this message with the turtle pace "hunt and peck" method so you can relax in knowing I did not loose any fingers. The hatch slammed close on my index, middle, and ring finger of my right hand between the 1st and 2nd knuckles. With sudden accidents like this it takes the brain a moment to realize what happened. The first thing I did was to open and close my hand a couple times to be sure that everything there was working alright. All fingers working, i checked the bleeding rate by licking the blood off the cuts to see how fast it came back. I wasn't interested in getting stitches by someone untrained on this boat while its rolling , and 2nd worry was I didn't want to bleed on the teak decks on my way to the pilot house on my way to the first aid supplies. Aaron helped to clean up and cover my wounds and the bleeding stopped fairly quickly.
I did my two watches that night one handed. I would sail the next day one handed as well including releasing the spinnaker sheet and sail handling in a jibe (downwind turn).
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