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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacques Chitte who wrote (65644)	10/27/2004 9:09:31 AM
From: Crocodile	Respond to of 71178

...I should dig out the photos I took last year while traversing the Southwest. Yes, you should! The weather was the sort that I'll remember all my life. We don't get real t'storms where we live, so seeing them, huge magnificent living things, God's Kleenex, all opened up in this endless clear air ... like R said it was spiritual. Yes, nothing quite like a thunderstorm. My family used to have a cottage on the upper Ottawa River across from the low range of mountains known as the Gatineau Hills. The thunderstorms would come blasting downriver from the north and it was often an awesome and sometimes terrifying sight. Bolts of lightning shooting at targets on both side of the river. Great crashes, blasts and zaps, accompanied by the occasional scent like gunpowder when a nearby tree or rocky outcrop took a direct hit. When I was about 12, I was caught out in a mile-wide section of river in my small wooden dorey with a 3 h.p. motor when one of these storms rapidly descended. Very frightening thing to have your little boat picked up and carried along on the crest of huge rolling waves -- like being carried along on the back of a whale. The motor konked out within seconds and I resorted to rowing to keep my boat running with the wind and waves. There was no real hope of holding the bow of the boat into the wind, so I turned the stern towards the oncoming wind and just rowed for all I was worth until the storm pushed the boat against the shore. The rain was coming straight down, so fast and hard that it was difficult to breathe -- I've only experienced such a thing that one time and other people who were caught in that particular storm have said the same thing. Visibility was almost zero.. I couldn't actually see the stern of the dorey, but I could see the big rollers going by the gunwales beside me, so I knew when I was running with them. I had 2 girls in the boat with me -- we had been upriver on an island having a little cook-out earlier in the afternoon. They were absolutely terrified (and who wouldn't have been?), but I yelled at them "BAIL!! BAIL!! BAIL!!" and they bailed like mad with our metal pots. Even at that, the water grew deeper in the boat within seconds, and our leftover lunch makings -- hotdogs and buns were floating past my ankles as I rowed. By the time we got to shore, the boat was practically submerged -- just a couple of inches of the white wooden sides showing below the inch wide red trim strip along the top of the gunwales. A French family on the Quebec side of the river said they saw us racing towards shore out of the storm and ran down the rocky hillside from their cottage to catch the front of the boat and pull it against the rocks as we made shore. They tied the boat to a tree and it had pretty much sunk within the couple of minutes after we left it to climb up to their cottage and wait out the last of the storm. A search party of family members soon came upriver in a large motorboat and our rescuers stood out on the rocks above shore flagging them down. I can still remember us being hugged while being yelled at for being caught out on the river in that kind of storm (typical "parent reaction" to a terrifying situation). We were pretty lucky. At least a couple of people got drowned in various sections of river elsewhere that day. I figure we made it through mainly on luck, but also because of the design of my wooden dorey boat -- the kind that aren't really seen too much anymore. They're solid and heavy, with a real rocker to them, and a very high bow and stern. They're designed for serious rowing and mine had very heavy oarlocks and a real set of big oars which could dig right into the waves. I had just gotten the little outboard that summer, but before that, I'd been rowing up and down the river in my boat for 2 years, so I could really row up a storm as it was the only way I could get from Point A to Point B to visit my friends. Damned glad that I could row that well because I believe we would have been swamped in seconds otherwise. .... Just one of many wild adventures from Croc's youth... (o: