You might want to sit down and pour yourself a coffee before you read this next story. It is a doozy.

I tell this story without editorial comment because I couldn’t make up this kind of stupid. We have seen a lot of careless people on the water, and lord knows most of us have stories of boaters we have had to help. But this guy was very close to squeaking in under the wire as the 2021 Darwin award winner.

On December 30th, a 28 year old guy from a nearby island, who recently arrived from Ontario and, for the sake of the story, we will call Lucky, set out for a solo trip in the waters around the sparsely occupied island next to us. The temperatures were close to zero degrees and the water was predicted to be so bad that E and I left for the city on the 29th to avoid any issues on the 30th. We drive a nice 22 ft aluminum Tom Mack with a cabin and Yamaha 150 four stroke engine. Lucky was in a blue kayak. Integral to the story, as you might have already guessed, Lucky was not wearing a life jacket.

The waters, as predicted, got rough and Lucky thought it best to find refuge in a cave next to the shore. But two days passed and the waters hadn’t improved and he was hungry so he risked heading home. As was likely to happen, Lucky flipped his blue kayak beside the booming grounds and had to swim to shore. He lost everything in the ocean. All that Lucky had were the very wet clothes on his back when he eventually found and broke into an abandoned cabin. He stripped and wrapped himself up in a bed sheet and sleeping bag before heading out in his boxers and boots to further look for help.

At 4pm on January 1st he knocked on my friends door. It was snowing, -2 and Lucky was standing in his entryway wearing boxers and boots and wrapped in a sleeping bag and bedsheet. My friend got him some warm clothes, fed him 8 granola bars, two hot dog buns with peanut butter and six bottles of water He let him sleep in the spare room. Lucky slept for thirteen hours. The next day after a breakfast of 6 bags of Quaker Oats, 2 cups of tea and 4 more granola bars, my friend took him by boat back to his island with a recommendation to refrain from any future winter kayaking trips and a suggestion to go and buy a lottery ticket.

The blue kayak is still missing. True story, I couldn’t make

this stuff up