Not NEARLY as exciting as Nick’s but it is typical Uncle Pete stuff.
One of Pete’s birthday presents was a canoe – and yes, it fits on top of the MINI and I will send pictures soon.
The day he bought it and loaded on to the MINI for the ride home, he also picked up a few things at the hardware story too including sand. Did anybody mention that sand is HEAVY? When unloading everything at home … he pulled a muscle, the result being that he had to wait 2 weeks before he could get the canoe wet…
Impatiently, we waited till the day before Fathers Day and Amanda consented to being bowman on a 12 mile stretch of the James River, so we staged the cars (river was too high to paddle upstream!) and loaded the canoe with fishing gear … decided NOT to risk the camera (because it looked like rain, not because we were afraid of flipping the canoe). I also had a new ‘canoe chair’ I wanted Pete to try out. The first three miles are flat water, nice current so it was a good float… realized quickly that the river was so muddy we’d have to snag a fish, he’d never SEE the lure to bite it so… we practiced casting…
We found a nice, small island and decided to explore it, skip flat stones, etc (for a 20 year old kid, Amanda’s still pretty darn good at skipping stones, and a lot of fun on the canoe trip). We re-load the canoe, bow down stream, Amanda already aboard, Pete shoves off (like I’ve done 100’s of times, right Ray?) step into the canoe, nearly trip over the new “canoe chair” and sit down on a fishing pole!! (nope, missed the lure) we wobble, take in about 2 inches of water but stay afloat, so I suggest to Amanda that we reverse course, get back to the island and empty the water …
We begin to do this, get perpendicular to the current and … Somehow, Pete managed to lean into the current, tipping the boat again, dumping Amanda (completely submerged), me, him, fishing poles, tackle box, water and lunch into very muddy water…. (I highly recommend PLANO tackle boxes, they FLOAT and as a result we still had the car keys!!!!!).
I realized that it was ‘only’ waist deep – as did Amanda, shortly before Pete could “rescue” her and the three of us pulled the mostly submerged canoe back to the shore to re-load (anybody want a “canoe chair”!!!) I couldn’t convince Amanda that we should try to find the fishing poles in three feet of muddy water with our feet – for some reason she figgered we’d find the lure’s first and that was not a good idea…
The rest of the trip was uneventful (but very fun!) and we were mostly dry by the time we hit the downstream takeout.
Amanda thought she would be funny, so for Father’s Day she bought me a Spider Man fishing pole!!! Which I will faithfully use whenever no one is looking.