Surviving my 26th Birthday!

Another big night was upon us as I ticked another year off. Cat was on the case with a sponge and Nutella birthday cake which was truly awesome! The night of the 2^nd was fun, at midnight I was treated to the usual TreeTanic ‘Brain Hemorrhage’ birthday drink which was followed by lots of free drinks from my adoring public. I got rather drunk and contemplated riding by bike through Coco-Loco’s and off the pier, but instead I just fell asleep.

The next day (my actual birthday) was slightly more subdued to begin with. At first I wanted to do nothing but Nela came up with the awesome idea ok kayaking. We got the ‘cobra’ out and dunked her in the water and off we headed with 1.5 oars and a whole load of hangover… we paddled for about 3 minutes and then decided it would be more fun to just lie down and drift, plus we kept falling in when trying to paddle which was just plain annoying. We were rather more successful at this drifting approach and found much amusement in drifting past several dive sites and several dive boats, all of which presumed we were dead until we mustered the energy to do the PADI standard – I’m not dead signal.

The sun plummeted into the ocean ahead of us signaling it was probably time to head back. We sat up and began to paddle… this didn’t seem to do us much good. Our boat by this point had taken on a fair volume of water through the many wholes along its bow, and was not sitting to pretty in the water. Thinking back through our PADI training we remembered that salt water weighs 1.03kg/litre whilst fresh water weighs 1.00kg/litre, we then realized that this knowledge was not really helpful at this point and tried to paddle harder… Thinking quickly we decided to head to the nearest pier and drain the Kayak… this almost met with disaster as we came within a few feet of grounding the boat on some coral, batting the urge to laugh uncontrollably we tried to back pedal ourselves out of trouble, this was difficult as we had not really mastered front pedaling…

There is a lot to be said for knowing when to admit defeat, and we finally reached this point and decided to let the sea take us wherever it intended… this miraculously ended up very close to the lagoon, with renewed enthusiasm, and with the current, wind and pretty much the whole island behind us we powered into the lagoon. After finding a suitable pier to drag our boat onto we let it drain for what felt like 30 minutes. We also found a local guy who gave us a few pointers, well I think that’s what they were, I didn’t really understand what he was saying, I just nodded than continued into the lagoon. By this time it was pretty dark so we decided the only option was to hide the kayak under the nearest house and walk the two miles back to UDC (Utila Dive Centre).

Somehow we still had energy and managed to dance the night away when at about 4.30am we had a sudden, yet profoundly awesome idea… we would go and get the kayak so no one at UDC would know it was gone! We found an American with a golf buggy and said kayak was intricately placed atop this 12 volt beauty and returned to its home.

I love it when a good plan comes together…