BUT AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION IS WORTH TWO IN THE BUSH

My buddy Jono came to town to visit myself and his brother, who also lives in the greater Mountain View area. When people travel a really long distance to see me, I make sure we do lots of memorable stuff so they'll wanna come back sometime. For example, when my sister came to visit in May, we went to fabulous Alcatraz for a tour. That trip was so fun that in July I had another visit from my sister*.

To make sure Jono had maximal fun awesomeness, I decided we'd go sea-kayaking in the bay beside San Francisco. When Jennifer was down in July, her and I booked a guided trip from City Kayak, which worked out well. The trip was a reasonable $62 and we were given plenty of instruction: what to wear, where to go, how to sit in the kayak, how to paddle, even what size of lifejacket we needed.

But for this trip I never booked a trip or lesson, so my plan was to skip the learning and just rent kayaks. The rentals are for people who already knew what they're doing. This profile fit myself and I was prepared to provide Jono and his brother with all the help they'd need.

But for Jono and his brother, kayaking was potentially dangerous and they weren't going to rely on my horrible memory for the critical details. Instead, they got all the details from the City Kayak staff. Questions asked were: "what do I wear?", "where should I go?", "how do I sit in the kayak?", "how do I paddle?", and even "what size of lifejacket do I need?" While they were asking all the questions I was getting very anxious, fearing that they won't rent kayaks to us without a lesson, and we were making it clear that we didn't know what the fuck we were doing at all. In particular, the question "Who do we call when we need rescuing?" did not instill confidence.

Finally they let us go with some kayaks, but instead of the normal 'sit-ins', we were given the much more idiot-proof 'sit-on-top' kayaks. The difference is that with sit-on-tops, should you manage to flip over, all you need to fix things is flip it back and climb on top. They might as well have made us strap on water wings to compliment our PFDs. I felt that my buddies were being too cautious, and that if they'd only pretended that they knew what they were doing we wouldn't be stuck with training-wheels kayaks.

So we get out on the open water. About a half hour in, Jono breezes by me as he attempts to see how fast these kayaks can actually go. And about three seconds later, he tips over in slow motion and completely drenches himself. Good thing for the training-wheels kayaks.