Fighting the nets
Last week, at Sailing School, I decided to get away for a bit of a relaxed sail, and so jumped on my boat and sailed off to the other side of the lake, anticipating a gentle and relaxed sail. And it was a gentle and relaxed sail for the first bit. I managed to make myself comfortable on the boat, open my beer, then lay back and relax. Unfortunately I didn’t realise there were fishing nets laid out all across the section of lake I was sailing on, which isn’t usually a problem because my boat can sail over them, but a bit of net caught on the rudder, so thinking it was a quick fix job, I just casually leant over the side of the boat to pull it off. Unfortunately at this very moment, I went over another net, which made the boat judder, resulting in me falling off the back. I did grab for something to hold onto, but unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) the only thing I grabbed was my life jacket. Which left me in the water while my perfectly balanced boat sailed into the sunset alone.
I then spent the next ten minutes fighting to get my life jacket on while trying to cut myself free (luckily I had a knife in my pocket) from the net my foot got caught in, in my vein attempt to swim after the boat. After I realised my boat was not stopping any time soon I started my long (and terrifying) swim towards the very far away land. After about five minutes of hard swimming and screaming my lungs out, I came to the very scary realisation that no one could either see or hear me, and since the boat was still on a perfectly straight course (amazing boat!), no one had reason to be worried. I was over a kilometre from shore and was not getting picked up any time soon. It is a very scary realisation that there is absolutely nothing you can do to help yourself, especially when you are swimming on your own, surrounded by nets full of fish, in a dam infamous for crocodile attacks. At that moment I suddenly thought about the H-metro headline, and wondered if they would write about the silly little girl who got chomped by a crocodile while swimming among fishing nets. And that’s when I started swimming hard again. I could think of nothing worse than my entire life being reduced to a badly worded headline about a ridiculous incident.
Luckily for me, some friends had seen me sailing across and had sailed out to try race me, and, noticing a screaming, splashing idiot in the water far away from any land or boat, went to investigate. They managed to pull me, exhausted, onto their boat and let me recover a bit before dropping me back in the water close enough to my boat to save it (not an easy thing to get back in that water). I have never felt so relieved in my life as the moment they pulled me onto their boat; by that stage I had been in the water for almost half an hour, swimming against the wind and fighting not to get caught in the nets around my feet. I realised just how dangerous sailing can actually be and decided that from now on, wearing a life jacket all the time is a very good idea!
I’m certainly not going to end up an H-metro headline yet!