Row Row Row your boat


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North America
February 2nd 2008
Published: February 2nd 2008
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Gene got hit by a car today. Not bad. Well, that is easy for me to say; I didn’t get hit. He got whacked in the knee pretty good and it was starting to swell nicely.
Nancy and I were following Gene and Jack down Zion Hill into Apple Bay. Big Sexy and some other locals were setting up the Friday Night Fish Fry. Gene stopped his truck, got out and without looking walked behind his truck to cross and a car coming up the hill ran right into him. Thank goodness the car was going slowly. Very often cars accelerate to get up the hill. He would be dead if he had been hit by one of those. And then we wouldn’t have a boat captain.

Yes, believe it or not, we now have a boat. In the water and running too.
Gene had been a great captain all day. We went to Jost Van Dyke. We had to go there despite howling NE winds because someone stole the gas tank from Gene’s truck last night, so we had to borrow some small tank and it would only hold a small amount of gas. And you can get gas on Jost but not Norman island so, we went over in rolling and windy seas and got soaked. It was great. After White Bay we went to Foxy’s and then to the wave pool. This was really cool. There is a natural pool that gets flushed by big waves. You wade out to this small cut in the rocks and try to hold on when the set waves roll in. You can’t hold on.
So the boat is great. There is some gunk in the engine that keeps making the engine overheat but we think we can fix that. Gene was mad at us, the crew, cuz we didn’t know how to do anything and we didn’t bring enough beer or ice. We tied the knots wrong, threw the anchor wrong, and worst of all didn’t clean up properly when we got back. And to top it all off, he got hit by a car.
Tonight is a going away party for Bryan Lucky and his friend Ron, who I have not met, but he just rowed across the Atlantic with three other people and won a race doing so.
The story is he got a DWI when a cop found him asleep at the wheel of a 7/11. He had stopped to buy cheez whiz and some ritz and then fell asleep and the cop found him with a ritz cracker hanging off his chin stuck there with cheez whiz.
So, rather than go to jail he jumped at the chance to get in a row boat with 3 strangers and row the atlantic. He had never been in any kind of a boat at all before this. Further he is not particularly athletic.
The captain of the boat had tried this crossing three times before. Despite those experiences, they had no electronics, no sag boat, no dry bags, and no radio. They had a compass. They encountered a storm with waves 30 feet high and got blown backwards for two days. To shit, they tied themselves to the boat and hung over the side. Thirty eight days to cross. They were wet the whole time. When they got on land and their feet touched solid ground all the skin on the bottom of their feet came off.
Oh, and Ron claims they cheated. The captain has been on ABC and stuff, but ron says he has a picture on his cell phone showing that they used a sail for two days. The captain is a Christian.
You can’t make this stuff up.


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