skullduggery and adventure on the high seas (lake?)

my girlfriend invited some friends and me to her cottage in michigan a few weeks ago. from a conventional viewpoint, the weather was terrible-- overcast skies and chilly winds were interspersed with booming thunderstorms for much of the weekend. but rather unexpectedly, the shit weather made things really fun.

saturday morning brought a torrential downpour that lasted into early afternoon, after which we finally spent some time on the beach. the storm spawned big rolling waves, colossal by lake michigan standards... which means coastal folks would have found them cute and quaint, but they were badass for a prairie-dwelling midwesterner who's only once set foot in an ocean.

the water was frigid and the waves large enough that i constantly felt off-balance. occasionally, i would fall and attempt to surface directly into another oncoming wave, inhaling bunch of lake water (probably best that i don't think about how gross that is) and likely looking rather foolish.

for a few seconds each time, the world was dark and cold and weightless and i had no control over anything. i imagine it was a bit like drowning but not scary because i wasn't in any real danger... so it was kind of fun. i wanted to stay longer but everyone else was cold, so we left.

the next day's weather was more summery, charring my ghoulish pallor to a shade nearly within standard parameters for healthy human beings.* we found an small sailboat with no sail partially buried in the wet sand near the water's edge. it was clearly abandoned, so we decided to try our luck with a little voyage.

while we were digging it out, i kept thinking "this is heavy as hell and it's filled with shitloads of wet sand, there's no way we're going to actually get it into the water." after we were paddling around in the boat, i kept thinking "there's no way this is going to stay afloat, there are huge cracks in the bottom." after a lot of bailing and brief, implausible thoughts about rigging a rudimentary bilge pump, i kept thinking "we're pretty far out, i hope i don't wind up as one of those newspaper stories about idiots who do something stupid and hurt themselves." but we didn't and it was fun. my two shipmates were true swashbucklers, to be sure.

after a while, we realized we had drifted pretty far south and decided to turn back. we tried to leave the boat where we came ashore, but some lady in a folding chair yelled at us. she was cranky as hell for someone who had her own private beach, so we kept walking. eventually we dumped the boat where we found it along the tideline. within seconds, the waves were reburying it with wet sand.


* at least on my forearms and the back of my neck.