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It all began after watching the America's Cup on T.V coupled with spending plenty of time near the water over the holidays. The idea of designing your own boat really appealed to me. The plan was for a fabulous craft with three hulls, a hole in the middle to look and swim down and nets between the hulls for storage. As I say, the plan was for a fabulous craft, we even had the timber laid out on the lawn in the raft's planned shape. Due to unforeseen technical difficulties it didn't turn out quite as planned. In the end it was just a square contraption filled with plastic bottles and pieces of polystyrene, but it was ours, we had designed and built it ourselves and that's what mattered. We all grabbed an edge and trudged out of the drive, down the path and down the steps to the bay. We slid the raft off the rocks and it surged into the water. Grabbing our particle board paddles, we leaped aboard. After drifting round Willow Bay for a while, we set off on an 'ocean voyage'. We went from Willow Bay, labouring hard with our disintegrating particle board paddles across Little Shoal Bay Finally after many a blister and several steering problems, there was relieving graunch of wood and polystyrene on coarse sand. We jumped ashore and dragged the raft a little way up Halls Beach. Feeling a great sense of accomplishment after our kilometre long voyage, we grabbed some biscuits and collapsed onto the damp sand. Once we'd recovered it was time for the return journey. As we slid the raft into the water, we realised the journey back would be twice as hard - the wind that was with us would now be against us and our particle board paddles were now like sticks with cardboard flapping on the ends. We were making little progress and the raft seemed to be getting lower and lower in the water, as parts of our sturdy construction came loose and floated away. Undeterred, we kept going. Eventually as we neared the shore. We were now sitting in rather than on the water. We were making no ground, our broomsticks could no longer move our submerged raft against the wind. We jumped off and began to push the raft towards the rocks. When at last we reached beach we still had most of the raft, but as we hauled it from the water, it finally gave up the ghost. We wandered up the path exhausted. In our raw hands we held bits of wood, the remnants of our adventure. Oh well, back to the drawing board and watching the real pros on TV! |
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Published on: 23 Nov 2010
