Regardless
of what you might’ve heard, life on the open ocean isn’t all wine and
roses. In fact, you won’t have any access to either of these things,
which is good because these are two of the biggest scams I’ve ever
heard of. Who pays for flowers? You buy them for your wife, she says,
“Hmm, nice. Thanks.” and they die in a few days.

Selling roses is a
license to steal from absentee husbands. The same goes for wine. I
tried drinking some wine before. What a mistake, I might as well have
been drinking a seventy-eight dollar bottle of grape-scented rubbing
alcohol. Horrifying. I suppose people can convince themselves to like
anything as long as it’s expensive enough huh? But I was supposed to be talking about the dangers of the sea, wasn’t I? I guess I can’t really name any specific dangers. Let’s just move on to some scenarios.

Rescue
others if you really want to. Having a raft probably means you’ve
escaped from a sinking ship. At this point you should decide if you’d
like to try to let other survivors into your boat or not. Think about
it carefully. On one hand it might make you feel nice to help others in
need, but on the other hand, people can get annoying. Do you really
want some fat guy in the boat breathing heavily, sweating, and eating
food? Do you want to have to listen to some old woman complaining
constantly about her sore legs and jabbering about her grandson David
who works at the post office? Keep them out.

I say what you do
is, let one guy in and give him the job of regretfully pushing other
survivors away with an oar. Then, when they’ve all drowned or gone to
other boats, push him out too. It might seem cruel, but it really
isn’t. It’s actually pretty funny.  

If You Have No Raft

• Doors

Assign
specific duties to each one. This will help keep things from devolving
into chaos. Just make sure to give the most important duties to a
personality that will perform them responsibly.

For example, if you
have a 1940’s gangster personality and you assign it to food rationing
duty, obviously you’re asking for trouble. Think about it: He is going
to hoard all the food and try to make the other personalities pay for
it. This won’t work because obviously nobody has any money. Give him
lookout duty.

If You Have An Anchor

Throw it overboard and cut the rope. What is even the point of an anchor anyway? Who knows. It’s useless.  

I
sure hope you didn’t expect any “pirate humor” in this section. If you
did: Buddy I feel sorry for you. So, as I’m certainly not going to allow
this to
devolve into any played-out
internet jokes, maybe I’ll just perform some avant-garde internet art
for you instead.

The following paragraph is full of lame pirate jokes. To make it more
interesting, I switched all the “E”s and “I”s to “W”s.
Then I went ahead and switched all the other letters to “W”s too (Well,
except the “V”s I left those as “V”s but there weren’t any of those in
the paragraph. But I had one character just say the letter “V” at the
end to prove it). Check it:

Death Dealing

If you’ve chosen
to rescue others, there may come a point when you have to kill one or
more of them in order that the rest of you can survive. This is
definitely a tough situation, but luckily I have experience with it in
a dream I recently had. In this dream I was in a lifeboat with a bunch
of people. It had too much weight and was about to sink, so I had to
kill someone. Here’s how it went down:

This girl I used to know appeared on the boat. I was talking to her, and she
complained I had bad breath. I looked for something to eat, but all we
had were saltines (which make bad breath worse). Then I was suddenly
climbing this rickety old ladder on the face of a cliff and I was
checking out some other girl’s butt as she climbed. We got to the top
and started browsing through books on a giant bookshelf. I saw a
message in my mind that 5 people had fallen to their death from those
ladders trying to get to those books. Then I was in a desert in a bus
fighting some monsters with terrorists.  

In conclusion: Dreams.