East Coast Sailing Trip

So after twiddling my fingers for only so long, i felt it was about time to do something interesting rather than sit on my arse. I'd wanted to learn to sail international yachts for some time, and i couldn't think of a better place to do it than Sydney. The best course was a 5 day trip leaving on the Saturday, so after buying half my gear and borrowing the rest, and getting the green light from the misses, off i trekked down to the nearby rushcutters bay to meet my crew. After meeting 5 burly men it became quickly apparent that my nicknames were going to be 'Kid', 'Junior' etc as they were all in there 40's and 50's. there were 2 of us doing the competent crew course, and 2 others doing the skipper course, which worked out well as we could pare up throughout the course. So after leaving on a beautiful sunny calm day, i thought this was going to be a lovely little trip. We were going to slowly work our way up north to Port Maquarie then do an overnighter to get back for the Wednesday afternoon.... or so we thought! After about 4 hours, we were out to sea, and the weather started to change. It slowly became choppier and choppier, with the wind picking up. And after a late lunch with the wind picking up, my sea sickness picked up. I hadn't expected to suffer, as i haven't in the pass, but this was slightly rougher weather than I'd expected. So whilst enjoying great moments such me on the front deck with dolphins swimming along, jumping out of the water, I was also trying to stop myself feeding the little buggers my lunch!
Then the sky became dark and we saw the clouds coming in quickly. After hearing the weather warning on the radio, we knew we were going to have some interesting time ahead. So here i was, with no experience and my first time on a yacht, with gale force winds blowing against us (thats 70-80 km/h) with the boat almost at an angel of 45 degree, me clipped by a harness onto the rail of the boat with my legs dangling over the side, huge waves crashing against us, flooding the deck, and throwing the boat up and down, up and down, up and down. My sea sickness was really loving it! After an hour of this we hadn't made any distance as we were being thrown back and forth, until finally we were able to sneak into a little cove and rest up for the night, Phew! As i spent most of the time either throwing up, or just holding on for dear life, I felt i owed it to the guys to cook dinner. And from that point on my new nickname became 'cook'. The next day was bad weather again, so we just cruised through the river and waterways behind palm beach. On the Monday we zoomed up to Newcastle Yacht Club with perfect sailing weather. After we all got our first shower of the trip, we felt slightly human again, though it didn't last long.
On the way home we we went up the Hawksbury river to the most difficult sailing area in NSW. We had to go through rocks on one side and breaking surf on the other, checking the depth monitor the whole way. By the last day I'd pretty much cooked everything in the boat, which only helped our speed a little as there was no wind, so we slowly snaked back to Sydney.
So after starting with nothing, I have all my qualifications and I'm now on a crew list trying to get some racing experience!