All right. So I've been gone on a boat for the past six days or so. This is my story.
I'll start by outlining what I'd been told would happen going into the trip. We (about 20 guys from my Scout troop) were going to get on this 70-foot long boat and sail around in Florida. We were going to snorkel and see awesome sights, fish and stuff, and maybe stop by a couple of islands. There was another boat, too, a catamaran called the Dreamer. We were going to put 13 guys on the Eagle (the one I've been talking about) and 7 on the Dreamer, and then switch out twice so that everyone got a chance to be on the Dreamer. The trip took place from Monday morning to Saturday night, and we were going to head to Miami on Friday night and have a fun night on the town, maybe sleep at a hotel or something. There were six sophomores (we're the senior scouts; in fact, we founded the troop) that went on this trip, and since this is probably going to be our last outing with the Scout troop, we were hoping to have a pretty fun experience.
We couldn't have been more wrong if we thought we were going to ride a unicorn to Mars and stop by the Taj Mahal for tea with Ghandi.
We showed up to the harbor late Monday afternoon and started looking around for our boats. We knew that they were called the Eagle and Dreamer, and they were supposed to be pretty nice. After a bit of looking, we found the Eagle. It was about 50 feet long, counting the seven or eight feet of protruding bow that couldn't possibly be used for living space. We looked at each other and made sure that it was the boat we were supposed to be on. It was. The sophomores started walking to the catamaran to see what it was like, but before we could touch it we saw that six or seven kids - all of whom were two or three years younger than us - had swarmed on it and claimed it as their own. We could have easily forcibly expelled them, as they were all pretty small and weak compared to us, but we decided to be nice guys and - since we were going to switch off in a day or two anyway - we took our stuff aboard the Eagle.
The first thing we noticed was that it was pretty small. It turned out that there were six beds and two usable couches for the thirteen of us to sleep on. That's a total of eight sleeping areas for thirteen men, for six days. Then we noticed the stench. The heads (toilets) were of pretty poor quality; I won't go into detail here, as it's pretty nasty, but let it be said that they clogged several times a day and made all of the cabins smell like "the inside of a dead elephant's rectum", as one of the Scouts so eloquently put it. Once we set up our stuff, the captain turned on the motor and we idled out of the harbor, anchoring about twenty minutes out. We slept, or tried to. I tried to sleep on the deck, but it ended up being too windy and cramped - we had three guys sleeping on the same box, when it would have been awkward with just two. I then tried sleeping on one of the beds, but the waves that sounded so innocent and quiet from up above were actually socking hard against the side of the boat and making a huge amount of noise. I got two hours of sleep that night.
I can't remember much of the next day (Tuesday), except that we spent five minutes learning how to sail and we were told that we weren't going to switch to the Dreamer until the day after. The sophomores figured, okay, we'll just switch then and take the Dreamer for the rest of the week. We slept. I folded my sleeping pad in half and curled up on the ground by the couches and right next to the ladder to get to the deck. That's where I slept for the remainder of the trip.
On Wednesday, we sailed a little and then snorkeled for about fifteen minutes. The reef we anchored at was pretty plain, though - there weren't many fish, and it didn't look cool at all. At some point the engine broke for about half an hour. We were told that we weren't going to switch boats at all for the duration of the trip, as the captains didn't want to because they claimed the logistics wouldn't work. At lunch, a couple of people swam over to the Dreamer to see what it was like. We found out that each kid had their own queen-size bed, there were two fully operational showers and bathrooms, they had leather couches, and they were watching Family Guy on the DVD player that one of the kids - the son of the Scoutmaster who had expressly forbidden us from bringing DVD players - had brought. After dinner, we decided to try out the VCR and TV set. We put in the tape of the singularly awful movie known as "Deep Blue Sea". As soon as we pressed play, the TV started making the noise of static and simultaneously playing the video and audio of the tape. To give you an idea of the effect given, imagine having a conversation with one or two of your friends and having a stranger come in and stand there, making the dial tone sound at the top of his voice. After watching the movie, we slept.
On Thursday, we decided that we'd head out to this statue the Dreamer's captain had told us about. He said that a 22-foot tall bronze statue of Jesus had been built and was sunk in 27 feet of water; it was supposed to be an amazing experience. Figuring that we might salvage the trip that had, so far, been completely boring and a profound waste of our spring break, we set out. At around 10 AM, we ran aground on a coral reef. The captain told everyone to run out to the bow (front) of the boat and stay there in the hopes that it might help us get off the thing. Then he told us to head to the starboard (right) side of the boat and lean out. We did this while he gunned the engine for about an hour, stirring up huge amounts of sand. One of the Scouts said "I'm going to laugh when the impeller [the thing that sucks in water to cool the engine] gets clogged with sand and the engine breaks." Finally, the captain gave up and consulted his tide chart. He saw that high tide was going to be about 4 PM that day, and told us that we were basically stuck till then. After an hour or two, he radioed SeaTow (some company that apparently helps people out of precisely the situation we were in) and told them to get us out of there. The SeaTow boat showed up at around 3:30 PM. The guy drove circles around us for about ten minutes, then came up to us and tied our boat to his. While this was going on, the tide was coming in. Not thirty seconds after he had tied himself to us, while he was still debating prices with the captain, our boat started moving. The guy stood there for five seconds, not wanting to realize what was going on, and then started screaming off strings of obscenities and running around on his boat, attempting to untie the lines. As we floated away, dragging his boat with us, he whipped out a massive knife and frantically sawed at the remaining ropes. From what I gathered, he was in pretty big danger at that point. While this was going on, our captain stood on the deck, stripped naked without warning, and put on a wetsuit so that he could untie any lines stuck on the boat. The SeaTow guy eventually sorted everything out, and we went back on our way. Not forty-five minutes later, we ran aground again - this time on a nationally protected wildlife sanctuary of a coral reef, most likely causing irreparable damage to the ecosystem. He called SeaTow again, and an hour later the same guy came and, this time, got us off the reef. We figured "screw this" and anchored a little while away by some lighthouse. That night, we tied the Dreamer and Eagle together and had a sort of dinner party that amounted to all of the guys from the Eagle climbing aboard the Dreamer and gaping in awe at their good boat - you know, the kind of boat that we were supposed to be on. We were tied together for more than two hours. This would have been a perfect time to switch boats for the rest of the trip, but the captains forbid us from doing that. We slept.
Early Friday, the captain realized that the boat's engine was broken. After working on it for two hours, I heard him tell the first mate that the impeller had sucked in too much sand and had broken, causing the engine to overheat. We were too depressed to laugh. I read for the first four hours that he worked on the engine, looking through the portholes (windows) every so often. I saw the clouds going by pretty fast first one way, then the other. Either we were going forward and then in reverse very quickly, or the boat was turning a lot. I shrugged, figuring that the captain must have anchored the boat, and continued my book. After four hours, the first mate asked him if he wanted to anchor the boat. The captain furrowed his brow and said "Yeah, I guess that'd be a good idea." This means that the boat free-floated for four hours, with nobody steering it. It took the captain eight hours to fix the engine. At that point, it was something like 2 or 3 PM on Friday, which was supposed to be our day in Miami. The Dreamer had abandoned us the day before and arrived in Miami at around 3 PM. We were told that we wouldn't get to the city until midnight. We sophomores decided that we'd sneak ashore that night/morning and have a good time. From 10 PM to 11:30 PM, the waves were tossing the boat so much that it was tilted at a forty-degree angle each side every five seconds. This means that things were flying from side to side at a pretty decent velocity. A few of us were sitting on the couches, with a table inbetween us with a lot of stuff on it. This stuff was pretty heavy, and could only be moved with a lot of force. The aforementioned stuff started flying around and falling on us. At around 11:30 PM, we ran aground. When we ran aground, we were twenty minutes away from the harbor where we were going to dock.
It takes special effort to sail that poorly. We slept.
On Saturday, we cleaned the boat for a few hours and got all of our stuff out of it. I had a Belgian waffle at the food court; it was actually pretty tasty. I found the public bathrooms and showered for the first time in six days. That's one thing that I forgot to mention - we didn't have any showers on the boat, so we were all pretty stinky. This only made the boat smell even worse than it did when it only smelled like poo. I walked around the mall for about half an hour, checking out random booths. Not a single person there spoke English as their first language. A little while later, we stuck our stuff on a bus and headed to the airport. Our bus driver almost ran over a guy as he backed out of the parking lot, in addition to just barely missing a Corvette on the highway. He played rap music so loudly that my CD player couldn't drown it out when I turned it up the maximum volume. I'm pretty sure we almost died at one point.
We got back late Saturday night from the trip that was most definitely the biggest waste of spring break ever.
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