Marine safety, team building, motherless children: a recent outing proved to me that West Coast folks have very different attitudes about these concepts than what I learned growing up on the Prairies.
Word came down a month back that the North Shore News was planning a boat tour out of Horseshoe Bay as a workplace bonding exercise. I was unsure, until we were told that it would happen on company time. Ships ahoy!
Then word came down that they were looking for drivers for the expedition. Not, like, minivan drivers to save money with a carpool. Boat drivers. For, you know . . . the boats.
That’s strange, we all thought. What happened to the boat company’s drivers? Eaten by cougars? Lost at sea? Eaten by sea cougars!? It was a mystery. What kind of boats were they? Why did we need to drive them? Would there be hats?
Now, I’ve been on big ocean-going vessels before — ferries, the SeaBus, a party yacht cruise (at least the photos say I was on the party yacht — my memory is less convinced).
And I’ve been in little boats before. That’s how we sailed out on the Prairies — small and temperamental outboards on small and placid lakes. The great thing about those Prairie lakes is that if the boat dies in the middle, you can just jump out and walk back to shore.
I’d never, however, been out on a wee motorboat in the ocean. And, truth be told, I’d never really driven any kind of powerboat at all. I was always in charge of keeping a close eye on the passengers, other boats and beaches to make sure everyone was wearing a properly secured bikini. Safety first.
Naturally, I volunteered to be one of the drivers on our mystery boat tour. Why? Because I’m a very self-confident idiot. Also, I reckoned they couldn’t possibly let someone who’d never driven a boat before just take one of their boats out into the ocean. Could they?
When I arrived I was shown to my little outboard boat, told to sign a waiver, plunked down in the captain’s chair and told I’d be driving that baby right out into the open ocean. And joining me for an exciting self-guided scavenger hunt/drowning were four of the loveliest ladies from our office. And not just lovely — they were mothers, all of them. These weren’t awkward interns, know-it-all copy editors or ancient cat ladies — employees that no one would miss — these were bedrock folks who had families depending on them. I felt sick thinking that I was almost certainly going to kill at least one of them.
As we set off, all I could do was fall back on the onboard training given to us before departure by a guy who was probably at least 17. It was his first time giving the training for the scavenger hunt, he admitted.
His words of wisdom: Don’t run into the shore — it’s made of rocks. The big ships are ferries — don’t hit them. There are rocks underwater that you can’t see — don’t hit those. It’s just like driving a car. Go very slow in the harbour. After that, go as fast as you want! Be back by 6:30.
Off we go!
“It is just like driving a car,” I thought as we glided ridiculously slowly away from the dock, “except when I turn the wheel, nothing happens. Seriously, why aren’t we turning?! Oh no, I’m going to kill all these mothers in the world’s slowest boat wreck 10 feet from the marina!”
Phew, settle down there, champ. Apparently it’s just like driving a car except the road moves in various directions depending on the wind and the position of the moon, “turning” is more of a philosophical question than an actual state of being, and the other cars are the size of mountains. Somehow we made it out of the harbour and vroom, off we went as fast as we wanted! Which at first was very fast and then immediately slow again. As we began our trip down Howe Sound a few concerns arose:
Water is streaming up over the engine right into the boat, soaking our sweet and talented editorial assistant Debbie. Is that normal? Water is crashing over the bow (look at me using my nautical terms) and hitting us in the face. Is that normal? Waves are slamming into the hull, booming like a torpedo hit and causing me to fill my poop deck. Is that normal?
It turns out it was one of the windiest days of the season, and with seriously scary waves crashing into us, the ocean-going experience proved to be much more “up and down” in nature than any other boating experience I’d ever had, all of which featured “forward” as the main direction of travel. My overloaded brain was telling my rigid body to turn around after the first two minutes, but somehow I kept driving for two hours, my white knuckles and gritted smile hopefully masking my sheer terror for the benefit of the crew. And somehow we only lost one soul out there. Sorry Debbie, you’ll be missed.
Just kidding. Debbie didn’t die. We did finish dead last in the scavenger hunt though. I didn’t care. I was alive. The mothers were all alive.
We’ll all be there for the next team-building exercise, which I pray to God sticks much closer to the old newspaper traditions of downing scotch in a haze of cigar smoke. Hell, for that I’d even volunteer to be a captain again.
Andy Prest is the sports editor for the North Shore News and writes a biweekly humour/lifestyle column. He can be reached via email at [email protected].
What are your thoughts? Send us a letter via email by clicking here or post a comment below.
