“Ok Dad, I REALLY need to get these laptops charged! I’m not gonna make it!”  said a very restless … well, we will just have to void out any names to protect the “innocent”.

“I’m not getting on Navi, and separating myself from this boat…” I said firmly. (Navi is our 007-looking high performance dinghy)

“Yah Dad, we need some Sriracha sauce, I have money!” Added another unnamed voice.

“Look…” I clarified, “Navi has a new motor that has not yet been tuned, even if I get it to run, it may cut out and then we will have no way of getting back on this boat!”

“But we don’t have any Sriracha sauce!…” Insisted  the Sriracha voice.

“Oh honey, we also need sandwich bags and eggs… Oh! and chili, yummy…”

“Oh yay, can I come???”  requested yet another little voice.

“NO!!!!!” responded all the other voices in one accord…

“You are way to little to come!!!”  I explained…

…and there you have it, just like that; if you’re a parent you know exactly what I’m talking about…

There I was, an hour later with my Sriracha and Laptop sons in the Novi shaking my head and complaining, “This is a bad idea!…”

Sriracha and Laptop just sat there as an eager audience, happy to know that one way or another, at some point we would be in Sriracha and laptop land.

The motor ran with a fragile sputter after I fiddled with it for fifteen minutes.  I held onto Aleph Tav’s railing with my hand as Navi sputtered.  “This is such bad idea!…” I complained…

“Don’t we have paddles in here anyway…?” asked Laptop.

“Are you serious… This thing is over two thousand pounds… Oars are not going to move it!!!” I exclaimed.

Then it happened… In slow motion, with a sad violin playing in an imaginary background, my hand opened up as Aleph Tav’s railing gently left my finger tips…

I turned around to sit behind the steering wheel, took a deep breath, and gently began increasing the throttle…  Navi’s bow slowly began to rise as the prop thrust the boat forward for about five minutes.  Then all stopped.  I tried restarting the motor, but nothing.  After some fifteen to twenty minutes of frustration, and me blaming every one in the universe for what just happened, we found a can of starting fluid.  Laptop laying on his belly stretched out ready to spray the carburetor as Sriracha imagined all the tasty meals he was about to eat…

I cranked the motor over for a while, then BOOM-ffffsh-WAP… Fire exploded out of the carburetor, a can of starter fluid flipped in circles above my head, Laptop scrambled like a giraffe on an ice ring, trying to leap into the ocean, and Sriracha exclaimed, “what the heck?…”

I lunged at the carburetor to suffocate the fire, and began wondering why the heck I was getting rained on… With my hands over the carburetor I looked to the side… It was Laptop heaving water in every direction trying to put out the fire.

“NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!…” I yelled along with a few other words that my iPad’s spell check does not recognize.

When the excitement finally subsided, there we were drifting toward a rocky shore.

“Where are the paddles?…” asked Laptop as he searched the storage compartments.  We paddled for almost an hour with no success until finally Navi got hung up on sand near a rocky shore.

With about ten feet of water between us and the shore, we all sat there pondering what to do next.  I decided to jump into the water and run as fast as I could to dry ground.  The water was so cold, it turned my pants into ice, keeping it from going down into my boots.  Laptop and Sriracha looked on with amazement as I tried to pull the boat closer.  Although my feet were perfectly warm and dry, I went ahead and let them think their Dad was Superman.

“Your gonna have to climb on my back, and I’ll carry you to shore.”  I said  as I neared the boat with the water up to my (perfectly dry) knees.

Sriracha promptly held on for dear life, while I waddled to shore with him on my back.    Laptop shook his head;  “Frig that… I am NOT going on no sissy piggyback ride!” He scoffed.  He took a couple steps back, then a couple of steps forward to reassess…  He went further back to get a longer running start and there he stood; his long hair flailing violently to and fro in the direction of the shifting wind.  Then he walked back to the front of the boat; “Frig that… I’ll take the sissy piggyback ride…”

After a long walk along the shore we passed a sailboat  laying on her side against the rocks.  The wind cut past our ears like a frozen knife.  Finally after a very long and cold walk; civilization…  We walked down a long street and began to smell food.    It was at little Japanese restaurant…

“Wooha Dad… I bet they have Sriracha…!” said Laptop…

We enjoyed a heavenly meal prepared by a Japanese chef who put together an amazing sushi creation for us.  It was wonderfully  warm and cozy there, but soon we would be back in the street, looking for a fuel can to bypass the filters on Navi hoping to restart the motor and return “home”…

After several hours, and many bus rides where for some unexplained reason none of the drivers charged us for the ride, there we were walking with all our provisions through the woods, back to Navi.  The wind had increased to 45 knots and the temperature dropped to 10 degrees.

When we finally got back to Navi, my heart sank…  The tide had risen, and the boat was now against the rocks side ways, being slammed by frozen waves.  Laptop and I quickly got in the boat while Sriracha found shelter in a nearby port-a-john.  We tried desperately to bail Navi, but soon realized it was useless.  Large waves not only were swamping it, but froze seconds after…  It was no use.  With numb hands we climbed the frozen jagged rocks to huddle all together in the toilet house…

Laptop adamantly insisted on going back out to save Novi as Sriracha wrapped wads of toilet paper around his ankles and wrists to keep warm.

Some times you have to come to the end of yourself to find a place to stand firm.  And that is what I did.  No blaming, no discussing, no wavering. I made a difficult but firm decision.  We had to leave Navi helpless on the shore and find a place to rest for the night.

Covering our ears as we leaned into the wind, we headed back to the woods toward a busy road.  A seagull overwhelmed by the cold wind laid dead on its side.

Way out there, in that dark, cold, and windy night, my beloved Lisa comforted little Noah inside Aleph Tav, as the boat spun like a weather vane around a mooring…

To be continued