Canoe Chaos

          This story goes back to when I was in high school and on a field trip. Our class was at a camp where we spent the weekend together hanging out. The job of the counselors was to keep us busy during the day by giving us different activities. One day they decided to have us all partner up and go canoeing. Since it was fall and close to winter, we were to do our best to avoid getting wet.
          When it came time to partner up, my friend Mike yelled "Who ever is partnering with me is getting wet!" I gladly stepped up to be partners with him. After everyone figured out what they were doing and got in the water, Mike and I came up with a plan. The plan was that at the end of the exercise we would jump out of the canoe and swim to shore.
          We all than started rowing onto the one side of the lake. Our groups were supposed to go around and collect as many balls as we could from the water. The team who collected the most balls would win. Mike and I got board with the game and decided that we wanted to go for our swim. We rowed up to the area by the dock. We had about twenty feet of water between us and dry land. We figured that we should be able to safely make it to land being so close.
          After a bit of mental preparation we jumped into the water. To say the water was freezing is an understatement. I felt like my body went into a state of shock and couldn't move. As I pulled my head out of the water I heard the muffled sound of Mike yelling at me. "Chris!" he yelled "grab the canoe!" I then noticed that one of our teachers on the shore was yelling the same thing to me in a panic.
          Now the reason that they were so concerned about the canoe is that it was being pushed by the current towards a waterfall that was at the other end of the lake. I immediately turned and saw the canoe just five feet away from me. I could have swam to it, but I didn't. The water was so cold that all I wanted to do was get out and I did not want the weight of the canoe slowing me down. I turned my back to it and swam to shore with Mike. We were both greeted by our teacher yelling at us to get back in the water and get the canoe. We ran out onto the dock in an effort to head it off, but it was far for us to reach out and grab it.
          At this point the counselor who had been watching the other students was now rowing as fast as she could to catch up with our canoe. Luckily, she was able to catch it before it could go over the water fall. As she rowed back to shore Mike and I decided to apologize like crazy. When she got onto the dock she said to us "If that canoe was destroyed over the waterfall you both would have had to pay three hundred dollars". After saying how sorry we were we went back to our cabin put on a new pair of clothes.