This is story number 1 of 4 (as of now)
Boating Incident #1 – The first time I had any problems boating was the afternoon that my brother-in-law and I decided to go crabbing in a row boat with a motor.
We were vacationing outside of Ocean City MD near a small bay named Assawoman Bay. Please don’t ask me for the history of this bay. I have no idea how the name was chosen.
Link and I failed to achieve our goal of catching any crabs for dinner that night. Therefore we decided to head our little boat towards a marina next to the inlet. We were sure that a good cold beer would help us forget that we caught nothing.
Now, Link and I are educated and experienced men. We are however, not very knowledgeable regarding the times for low tide at Assawomen Bay, which empties into the great Atlantic Ocean with thunderous waves. As we motored towards the marina where our ice cold beers were sure to be, we realized that our little motorboat was zipping along at a pace we had not yet experienced. I mean, it was flying.
We were being sucked out to sea by low tide. We put our heads together and figured out that we needed to turn the boat around. As soon as we did this we realized that, even though we were at full throttle, we were still heading out to sea.
The tide was faster than the little Putt-Putt. We never thought about doom or death. We did however, strategize and decided to angle the boat in such a way that as the tide sucked us out toward the inlet, backwards, we were still heading towards the marina.
Our strategy worked and we celebrated our win over the tide & Ocean with a nice cold Coke. Unfortunately there was no beer at the marina.
There are at least two things we learned from this experience
1 – Never take a little motor boat out in a bay connected to the ocean
2 – Stay away from marinas that do not have beer.
Teddy Burriss 