Adventurous boat ride...

Life in general is busy. But good. Work is busy. And evenings have been filled with watching the tv series 'Alias'! It's been quite a week :)

I have to tell you about my exciting Saturday last week. I was invited to join a group of Rotarians (visiting us at the center), on a boat ride to Banana island. Well, it was quite an adventure. Let's start at the beginning...

It was clean up Saturday- all of Freetown was expected to be out on the streets cleaning. So we couldn't go anywhere until after noon time. So we were off to a late start. Once we got on the boat we were ready to go. However, it was hard to actually get anywhere as the engines kept cutting off on the way out...dirty petrol was the reason! Anyway, we finally did make it. Then on arrival I felt like we were invading as we arrived in a remote village and were shown around, introduced to the chief etc. Then we went to a little beach to meet up with the rest of our group (they were on another speed boat). We got there and they were no where to be seen! We got out of the boat and on to the beach just before the ways got too high. As the boat went back out further we realized we left our lunch on the boat...by now it was 5pm anyway. We decided to go for a swim...well, the first person that went swimming was stung by jellyfish...needless to say, I didn't go swimming. :) By this time the other part of our group had arrived, but they had gotten very wet in their boat and were not happy. So we decided it was time to head back. Of course, we had to swim back to the boat. One person fell off of the boat just as he got back in...quite a back flip! Then while we were sailing back one of the seats on the back broke...so we had to fix that. And to top it all off- we ran out of fuel about 20 min before reaching the marina!!! So our skipper had someone drive to a nearby beach with fuel. We managed to make it there with the boat to meet the guy. He then had to strip down to his underwear and swim out to the boat with the 5 gallons of fuel. Then on our way around the cape...5 minutes from our destination...we almost had a huge wave accompany us in the boat!

It was quite an adventure. To be honest I'd do it again tomorrow. It was great to have a different experience. It gets a little old doing the same thing every weekend for a whole year! Because of all that went wrong, the skipper said he'd take us out on his boat again. I'm looking forward to it already :)