I had a pretty good one. My friend Donovan and I took my girlfriend at the time on one of our "adventures." We have a habit of purposely getting ourselves into crazy situations just for fun and exercise. I know this sounds ludicrous to some people. Just think of it as the same thing the Army does when they teach you how to survive. We've been doing it since we were kids. I can tell you this much. Nothing in the world can teach you how to keep a cool head and be a problem solver in any situation like putting yourself in those situations regularly just to figure out what to do.
Well one time, this went terribly wrong. My girlfriend had gotten tired of Donovan and I going camping all the time and not taking her. I tried explaining to her that the stuff we do is no joke and I didn't think she could handle it. She begged and begged and finally, like an idiot, I said Ok. I was much younger then. It wouldn't have been any excuse if any of us hadn't made it, but still I was and I didn't take everything into consideration. Now on the plus side, that's exactly the kind of thing that can teach you one more thing that otherwise you'd never learn. The trip was simple. We would take two crappy inflatable rafts we got from walmart and put them to the test. The test being a 10 mile or so rowing trip, filled to capacity and then some, out into the middle of a HUGE body of water.
The trip out went fine. We loaded up the little one person rafts. One with her and Donovan in it. They got to stay dry. Then, me with all of our gear, including tent, chairs, cooler, rifle, food, and my fat ass. With all of that in the little boat, it was a bit much and whatever end I was on was in the water. It was ok though. It was only March. I didn't mind. (Yes, that is winter here. Yes, I'm being sarcastic about it being fine.) So we row out there and find an island to camp on. Well as soon as we were making our way to shore, we found the defect in the boats. Apparently those thin vinyl little air filled boogers aren't rock proof. Who knew? Oh well, that's ok. Tomorrow morning, we'll patch them and make the trek back. No biggie. We made camp, started a fire, and started doing fun camping stuff.
Donovan started setting snares for dinner. We brought stuff, but it's always more fun to find your own. The backup food was mainly for the girl. If we didn't catch anything, we didn't care, but she would have been complaining about being hungry. The island we were on was only maybe 30 yards in daimeter. I managed to snag a few fish and a good size snake. Did my cleaning and started prepping them for the fire.
Donovans snares didn't do much as the only animals that were on and around the island were ones that could make the trip over or in the water.
Once we got settled in and I had dinner on the fire (the woman still ate the backup food, she couldn't eat the stuff I caught after she saw me clean it) we were watching the clouds roll in. Now we had checked the weather before we went out and it said clear skies all around. I don't know what the hell happened, but that was no longer the case. In no time at all, it was lightening all around us and the wind had made our tent and fire useless. The water from the lake was blasting all around us and the rain seemed hard enough to put our little island under the water.
The problems were now:
1) Our boats were popped and we had not yet patched them.
2) It was easily almost a mile to the nearest shore.
3) Through the blackness of the clouds, the lightening showed us that this was possibly a tornado storm and at the least severe enough that our current cover would probably hurt more than help.
4) It wasn't just us boys. There was a terrified girl with us with no experience and she was freaking out to say the least.
The plan I came up with was pretty simple. I could get one of the boats to hold air enough to get to the shore. I took the other boat and used it to wrap up the other supplies and hooked a line to it from the back of the inflated boat. As long as the supplies were in the water, even though there was quite a bit more drag, it kept the weight down in the boat and that let it hold air a lot longer. The first thing we had to do was get the girl to shore. I took her and the supplies first. The little boat could handle her and I in it, but there was no way it could fit all three of us so she was top priority. I took her and the supplies to shore. I found her a spot ina really deep ditch that provided enough shelter until I got back. Then, I blew the boat back up to full, cut the line for the stuff and got back in the water.
As I climbed in the boat to set out for the island to pick up Donovan, we heard the wind go insane. I was rowing as fast as I could. My arms were on fire. I was maybe an 300 yards from the island and the boat gave up. Qucikly I cut a length of paracord, folded it up as much as I could and tied it off to my belt. I swam the rest of the way. As I walked up the shore gasping, Donovan said "Weren't you in a boat when you left?" He looked even less happy when i took out my knife and cut the boat in half. I handed him half and blew air into my half. Then I took my ducked tape and wrapped the open end until half the tape was gone. He did the same. We both grabbed our new miniature versions of the boat and used them as little rafts and started swimming. About a third of the way through, the mini-rafts gave in and with the wind, we couldn't get them to blow up and stay in our hands. We just ditched them and swam the rest of the way. Both of us almost had several heart attacks on the way.
Now that we were on the shore, we looked it up on our map of the area. The good news was, we weren't going to drown. The bad news was that we were on the shore that leads to nothing but wilderness. All of the highway and tourist crap and docks and everything were on the side we came from miles away. We had to trek through the woods and go around the lake in the storm for the next several hours. Normally, if you were in that situation you'd want to find cover and hide out until the storm was over. Unfortunately, we were soaked, it was freezing cold and me and Donovan had just swam like crazy. Finally we got to a section of the highway that was close to the woods. Donovan and I had been smart enough to put our cell phones in doubled up plastic bags so we called 411 and got the number for a cab company. We finally found one guy that was brave enough to come out and pick us up. It cost all of 3 bucks to get back to the car. We tipped the guy 20.
After it was all said and done and we got home, the girlfriend turns to me and says "Thank God that's over. That was the worst camping trip I have ever f@cking been on. F#CK you guys." I looked over at Donovan and said "same time next weekend?" He said "definitely."
That was without a doubt the scariest shit at the time. I've had other times that were much more dangerous or crazy, but that one was the scariest just because of how long the time frame was. It was a several hour ordeal. That automatically made it ten times worse. I don't really car about wild animals, spiders, people, any of that stuff, but drowning or getting picked up in the air by a storm or have a stick go through me out there?... NUH UH!
