Your Mom is a Paddle-Boat
This weekend I went up to Stanford Sierra Camp in South Lake Tahoe to visit two of my fellow Branner Staff members for the weekend. Alex and I spent the morning hanging out on the boat dock, and if you asked me around 2pm how my day had been, I would have said, “very relaxing.” Then, Sagar took all 5 of us sailing. We went out on a Hobie Cat sailboat, which looks like this. We just kept sailing and sailing, and it was going so smoothly that Sagar thought we might make it all the way to the other end of the lake and back in time for dinner. At least, that’s what he thought until our mast ended up pointing towards the bottom of the lake.
Luanne had been holding onto the boat for dear life the whole time, but the rest of us thought that the worst thing that was going to happen was getting knocked in the forehead by the sail. Suddenly, water splashes over the front right hull, and a big gust of wind pushes the boat over. But a Hobie catamaran? These things don’t roll over. You’d have to submerge part of the front of the boat and go over at just the right forward/sideways angle to get it to capsize. Well, we capsized, and then completely turtled the sailboat. As it was rolling over, we all jumped off, except for Luanne, who held on and ended up underneath the boat for a hectic 5 or 10 seconds before she came out okay.
The temperature of the lake, which had been earlier described as “ice cold” by Alex (who could only be convinced to make one lake jump all morning, which lasted about 3 seconds), was no longer our biggest problem. Nor did we have a problem with our shoes and cameras, because Sagar made sure we left all non-essentials back on the dock. Our biggest problem was that our boat was upside down and there was nobody anywhere nearby. We tried to flip the boat back over by all hanging onto one side, but it wouldn’t budge. Then we decided to try paddling the boat to shore, but from the middle of the lake, we weren’t going to make much progress. Britt and I were paddling with our hands on both sides of the boat, Luanne and Sagar were swimming and pushing, and Alex, with 6 months of crew experience, was using our paddle. But we got nowhere.
The next thing we tried was to tilt the boat back upright from front to back. We all got on the back of the hulls, pushed on the rudders, and pushed on the end of the trampoline, and it started to move. We started cheering as it angled up, and when it was completely sideways in the water, we thought we had it. But that was as much as we could do. Sagar started climbing up the bottom of the boat and yelling “Your mom is a paddle-boat!” but it wouldn’t budge. However, having two hulls sticking 14 feet out of the water did something very important: people saw us.
A guy and his son who were out water skiiing found us, along with another boat of three people who radioed back to camp for more help. Camp sent another boat with two people, and a group of 6 more counselors who were out to water ski came by. At that point, there were 5 boats, including our upside-down Hobie Cat, and 18 people there to get us out of the freezing water and get us back to dry land. Alex and Luanne rode back with the random water ski guy, and Sagar finally got out of the boat after helping to tie ropes to the Hobie to pull it up. The camp counselors got the boat upright and towed us back to the dock. We lived to sail another day.
I think there’s a few more salient points I haven’t covered, if anyone who was there would like to add those in the comments, that would be excellent. It’s only fun writing when you know there’s people reading what you write.
August 3rd, 2004 at 8:40 pm
well put, darren. branner staff at its finest: in crisis mode :-)
August 7th, 2004 at 4:46 pm
I wish that certain Branner staff had called other members of their Branner staff who had returned from Europe and were in California this weekend doing nothing. Well, I guess those staff member(s) will just tell themselves they were busy that weekend anyway…psh.