Canoeing: Wind and Sunny July Morning

I had been canoeing many times before, but little did I know this trip would be unlike any other. It was a sunny July morning and me and my friends loaded up the SUV and headed for the river. The closer we got, the larger the knots in my stomach became. I couldn’t tell if the knots where there from nerves or the excitement, all I knew is that I could not wait to get the canoe in the water. We reached the old wooded building surrounded by orange and gray faded canoes and began to unload our supplies that would get us through the day.

Once we had picked out our canoes we loaded the bus and headed to the river. As we started down the old winding dirt road, the clouds began to pass over the sun and the skies began to grow darker. Without a care in the world we unloaded our boat and buckled our life vest. “Are you guys ready?” my friend Chad called out.

“Ready as ever,” we called back to him. We drug our boats down to the water’s edge and pushed off. This was the point of no return and there was no turning back now.

We had only been on the river for thirty minutes when the sun was completely consumed by the clouds. The knots that had formed in my stomach on the way to the river had then turned into lumps; thoughts of where would we go, what would we do, what if it the weather gets really bad all ran through my head. “Why do you look so scared, you’re not going to cry are you,” my friend Traice picked. I didn’t reply and I tried to act like I was not bothered by the growing clouds. By this point the wind had began to pick up and you could hear the thunder rolling in the distance. This was not a good sign considering we still had several hours before we reached the end of our trip.

About an hour into our journey the winds had increased greatly, the thunder grew loader, and the rain began to come down. “We need to get out of the water!” my friend Kaitlyn demanded to the rest of our group.

“It’s fine. There