 |
Baja Babes: Pre-paddle Jitters Appalachia, December 2002 Don't yield, I told myself, and against my better judgment, I counted to three, took a deep breath and tipped my kayak upside down. Surprisingly, I had plenty of time to knock, knock, knock; shimmy, shimmy, shimmy; and yank off my sprayskirt before I popped up to the surface and grinned. It was simple! Back on shore, Susan and Gail were preparing dinner. Tina made us all come to the kitchen area to learn how to use the camp stove. In Outward Bound, they teach you to do everything yourself instead of having it all done for you as on other "soft" adventure trips. I'd always managed to get out of having to light the stove, but here we were so few people, I knew that eventually it would be my turn. This scared me, because on all my other trips either the stove wouldn't light or it almost blew up in someone's face. After the demonstration, I sat in my camp chair watching the frigate birds drift in the invisible thermals. Pelicans dove into the water looking for dinner. About half a mile out were other islands, covered with craggy peaks. The sun set like a falling curtain, turning the surrounding rocks to burnished copper. If only the black sand would stop blowing in my eyes. Dinner was guacamole, salad, and fresh grilled fish, bought from the locals that morning. I was "volunteered" to do the dishes, which meant scrubbing the pots and bowls with sand, then rinsing them at the edge of the water. It was the strangest dishwashing method I'd ever tried, but even without hot water, it worked. Then the instructors called us back to the dining table (a blanket in the sand) and issued us more gear: three glow lights, flare, whistle, strobe light, and mirror. These items were to travel in our PFDs at all times, Tina said. If we were separated from the group, we should immediately activate the strobe light. On most Outward Bound trips they request that you put away your watch for the week, but here they told us to keep it. "If you're lost," Tina said, "on the top of the hour, scan the horizon with the mirror and send up a flare." We'd been joking during dinner but now there was silence as it dawned on us that this wasn't a game. We finally "toe flossed" (scraped the sand from between our toes) and crawled into our sleeping bags. I tried to concentrate on the canopy of stars, but all I could think about was being lost, caught in a storm, and drowning in a sea of fifty-foot swells. All of a sudden, one of the women let out a blood-curdling scream. I bolted out of my bag, positive some bandito had attacked camp, but it was a hermit crab crawling over Nancy's sleeping bag.
|
|||
 |
