I've had a pretty busy week, with my HT102 Summer Class and I have been needing to post this brief story since last Saturday.
Well, as I hope you know, last Saturday was my birthday (May 24). My wonderful wife surprised me with a traditional Bag-O-Deonna—a birthday bag full of all sorts of gifts and surprises. The Last gift was a receipt for a canoe rental. So, for my birthday, we rented a canoe and went out on White Rock Lake...
It was great fun. We took our dogs, too. They were a little uneasy at first, well, actually they were pretty uneasy the whole time. Both of the dogs fell in, off the canoe, at least once each. After exploring some of the creeks that branch out like fingers on the north side of the lake, we decided to head back and have some lunch.
However, while we were paddling back, I thought it would be a good idea to jump in the water—after all, it was about 95 degrees. So, after jumping in and out of the canoe about two or three times, we began heading to the shore for our lunch picnic. At this point, Deonna was at the rear of the canoe (not too sure why...) and I realized resultant of my swim breaks, quite a bit of water was now in the canoe... enough to seriously scare me.
I started to yell back at Deonna, "Baby, you need to rudder so we head back to shore!" I was stern, and serious, and immediately started to paddle towards shore.
Next I remember Deonna's shrieks, "What is rudder!!??" Then she just started shrieking... and I turned to see the canoe fill with water, and completely submerge.
Normally, this wouldn't be a problem (I have extensive training from the BSA), but the dogs just started to freak out. For about 10 or 15 minutes, we floated in the water, struggling with our dogs and a sinking canoe, as all of our items floated away. This was around 2:00 PM on a Saturday afternoon... in Dallas, TX. The shore was just packed with an excited, yet unhelpful, audience.
Luckily we made it out alive—my wife, myself, and our dogs—but not unscathed. Deonna and I both had pretty severe scrapes from the dogs, who desperately struggled while in the water, and I had a pretty good gash to my right eye, spilling blood, and producing a ripe black eye.
The red "X" shows the approximate location where our canoe submerged. Notice the biker bridge just to the right (North) of the "X".
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