All Write, Already!

Jamie and Tashe took a day trip to the Lake of the Ozarks and rented a pontoon boat. It was expensive to rent it for the whole day, but they had visions of reliving every favorite activity from their childhood lake adventures. A four-hour boat rental just wouldn’t be enough if they expected to go fishing, tubing, sun bathing and cliff diving.

They picked the boat up early and their first stop was the bait shop and gas station located near the cove where they spent their childhood summers. After a disturbing trip to the back room, where they kept the bait and the leeches, they were off with their tackle boxes, heading down to a quiet cove to try their luck with catching dinner.

They’d stopped in a shady cove and parked their boat near the shoreline, quietly waiting for the bait to attract some fish. After waiting for an hour and a half, they were getting restless.

“This is really boring.” Said Tashe, finally breaking the silence between them. “Maybe we should do some boating and tubing?”

Jamie liked that suggestion, and the girls’ excitement with the days plans seemed to rejuvenate when the boat started moving and they could feel the air rush through their hair. Jamie stopped the boat and dropped the inner tube into the water, unlatched the small metal door of the boat and plopped herself face down onto the tube. “Me first!” She cried, and with her right foot she pushed herself and the tube away from the boat.

Tashe started the boat’s engine and slowly trolled away until Jamie was safely behind her, and then upped the boat’s speed slowly and the rope that tethered the boat to the tube pulled taut. She reached the pontoon’s top speed very quickly, and the whole experience was just way too easy. She tried to maneuver the boat in zigzags and circles, but Jamie held on tight and the pontoon did a poor job of creating the kinds of waves that will knock a rider off their tube.
So often when they were children, their uncles and grandfather took turns trying to knock the kids off the tube in a teasing, all-in-good-fun kind of way. Tashe just couldn’t seem to replicate the moves their elder relatives used to pull on the tube rider.

Tashe killed the engine, and Jaime let herself slide off the surface of the tube and into the cool water. She swam with the tube back to the boat and offered Tashe her turn to ride.

“No, thanks.” Tashe replied. “It seemed so much more thrilling when we were kids. Now it seems kinda....boring.”

Just then, a speed boat full of posh, young, British gents zoomed by and circled the girls’ pontoon. “Bloody Hell!” said Nick, the speed boat driver. “Would you take a look at those girls?” he asked his friends. “Why don’t we slow down and take a closer look?”

His friends agreed and they whipped around a tight curve to head back in the direction of Tashe and Jamie’s boat. Unfortunately, Nick didn’t see or hear the speed boat coming up behind him, and as soon as he got his boat turned around they crashed straight into the oncoming boat.

Tashe and Jamie saw the collision from their pontoon and concluded that this was simply a doomed outing they’d planned. Tashe took the wheel, started the engine and drove the pontoon up along side the crash site. She worked to help those knocked from their boats out of the water and onto their boat while Jamie called 911 in case anyone was hurt.

Maybe they would try again next summer.