My Boating Experience

Yello!

It was a very beautiful Saturday morning. Just absolutely perfect weather. The sun wasn't too hot, the wind was blowing ever so gently and of course, the birds were chirping. So it was on this gorgeous day that myself and two girlfriends decided to go boating. Mind you, I've only been kind of boating once and that was in secondary (high) school. My entire class went to an island for a couple weeks and we were taught (but I didn't really learn) how to row.

The day started with all three of us going to the Farmers Market to get our sugarcane juice (in the absence of being able to chew on sugarcane itself, this is definitely the next best thing!), and some other food items for a picnic. We also thought far ahead enough to fill up water bottles. We were super pumped and were all set to go. The drive to the lake alone was an hour. About halfway, we realized we didn't take anything with us except the water bottles!! But we couldn't go back. So on we went.

We made it to the lake in one piece and were able to rent an electric motor boat. Begin problem number 2. Among the three of us, only one person had experience controlling this sort of boat. Of course the rest of us had to be in good hands right? Right. Under normal circumstances, we probably would have but there's never anything normal about my adventures. Our boat was moving at a snail's pace and since we weren't quite sure what we were supposed to be doing, we assumed this slow movement was all our fault. It took us a full hour to get to the shaded area we were targeting :(. Everyone else had flown past us at this point.

After chilling out and talking (we also forgot the books we were going to read in the car. As you can see, planning doesn't always equal doing), we decided to head back to the rental office. You guessed it! Problem number 3 came knocking. Our motor would not start. After much effort, it started enough for us to leave the shallow end and move about 15 feet into the deep end. We thought this might be a good time to row. Had I paid attention in my younger days, I would have been able to get us moving. None of us could row! How crazy?! Several attempts later, we realized we had been going around in circles. The pathetic part is, we thought we had made it at least 20 more feet forward. Sigh. Of course as luck would have it, the lake was only full of people kayaking so they couldn't tow us. We finally found the office number and spoke to someone. He said he was the only one in the office and wouldn't be able to come get us for an hour. This was beginning to seem very much like one of my flying experiences! After floating for about 30 minutes in about the exact same spot (the current was not on our side that day either), we saw a boat coming our way.

We quickly shouted for help and for the price of 100 Rupees (we chose this and they chose $100), they agreed to tow our boat. We all had a good laugh talking about our experience, how far we would have had to row, and how we probably would have been floating a while longer if they hadn't come our way. When we got to shore, the manager of the office had the nerve to laugh at us! He said he couldn't believe none of us could row. Dude!! Although, if I were him, I probably would have laughed too... in private. And of course, wouldn't you know, the motor was defective right from the start.

Notes to self here: Learn to row before going on another boating adventure.
       If the motor seems slow, it's probably defective so switch boats.
       Only go boating with people you like. That could have been real ugly if we didn't like each other.

Have you had similar or worse experiences with boats? Lemme know!
Tonia