Tuesday, May 10, 2005
Holiday Boating
So I'm back from four days away. It was fantastic, thanks for asking.
On Saturday we decided to hire a boat for a few hours to go putting along the river. While I don't consider myself an expert boat-driver by any stretch of the imagination, I have driven an outboard motor before, and it's far from the trickiest thing in the world.
So we cruised down the river for about an hour, and then pulled into an inlet for lunch. When we'd finished, we pulled up the anchor and started heading back. Just then I noticed a bee had landed on Karina's hat.
Karina doesn't like bees. He father is allergic to them, and never having been stung, she doesn't know if she is as well. And I decided that this wasn't a good time to find out.
The cool thing about boats is that you can step away from the wheel for a while - you've got heaps of open space, so there's no drama pointing the boat in a direction and then going to grab a drink or something. Or grab a hat and start trying to shake a bee off it.
The bee was a bit stubborn, but eventually decided to leave. So then I start explaining to Karina why I just grabbed her hat. Then I happened to glance towards the front of the boat - and realised that the boat was heading full pelt towards the almost cliff-like shore. So very calmly I grabbed the wheel and turned the boat away with maybe a handful of seconds to spare.
Fortunately that was the closest to disaster we got on the whole trip.
On Saturday we decided to hire a boat for a few hours to go putting along the river. While I don't consider myself an expert boat-driver by any stretch of the imagination, I have driven an outboard motor before, and it's far from the trickiest thing in the world.
So we cruised down the river for about an hour, and then pulled into an inlet for lunch. When we'd finished, we pulled up the anchor and started heading back. Just then I noticed a bee had landed on Karina's hat.
Karina doesn't like bees. He father is allergic to them, and never having been stung, she doesn't know if she is as well. And I decided that this wasn't a good time to find out.
The cool thing about boats is that you can step away from the wheel for a while - you've got heaps of open space, so there's no drama pointing the boat in a direction and then going to grab a drink or something. Or grab a hat and start trying to shake a bee off it.
The bee was a bit stubborn, but eventually decided to leave. So then I start explaining to Karina why I just grabbed her hat. Then I happened to glance towards the front of the boat - and realised that the boat was heading full pelt towards the almost cliff-like shore. So very calmly I grabbed the wheel and turned the boat away with maybe a handful of seconds to spare.
Fortunately that was the closest to disaster we got on the whole trip.
# posted by Simon Dugard @ 9:10 am 
