Stuck On A Boat

When I was about 10 years old, I had two best friends that were sisters. One was older and one was younger which made our friendship special. Our parents would always refer to us as “The Three Muskateers”. During the summer, our parents would always have cook-outs with each other and my friends and I would be able to spend time with one another. There was never a dull moment when we were together because we were always doing stupid things and making each other laugh. Especially in scary situations.

My friends’ neighbors house was quite close to theirs. The neighbors were very friendly and would always invite us over to swim in their pool, and to use their makeshift ice rink in the winter. On the other hand… they had a very unfriendly dog named Emma. Whenever they would let her outside, they would have to put her on a lead because she would always run to the closest person and bark at them. She would never attack people, but us 10-year-olds thought that her bark was what made her scary. Whenever the neighbors were outside, Emma would be calm and we would throw her toy and she would run after it and bring it back for us to play. But when her owners weren’t home, she got very protective of her home and we knew to never mess with her when they weren’t outside.

It was usually mid-afternoon when my parents and I were over at our friends. But on this day, my mom and their mom decided to go out shopping for more food for the barbecue we were going to have later that day, and our dads decided they would go fishing for a few hours. Our mothers weren’t going to be gone for very long so they thought it was perfectly fine to leave the three of us alone since we could easily keep ourselves busy. That was one mistake they made. The three of us were playing tag and running around the house. When we got to the back of the house, we noticed that Emma was on the neighbor’s porch hooked up to the lead and couldn’t chase after us. We found one of her toys on the ground so we were throwing them up at her. As we were doing this we didn’t see that her lead was already loose on her collar. That next moment, we had thrown her toy for the last time before we were basically running for our lives. After we threw the toy, when she went to jump for it, her lead snapped off and she came running for us. The three of us ran as fast as we could. The only place we could easily run to and be safe from the dog was towards their dad’s boat. Emma was drawing closer and closer and we quickly climbed into the boat. Once we made it into the boat, we realized that we were going to be stuck there for a while. Instead of crying and screaming for help, we were sitting in the boat laughing hysterically. We did have a few moments where we got scared we were going to be stuck there forever, but we knew our parents would be back soon to rescue us and we also knew there was no possible way we would have been able to make it all the way around the house to the front door without the dog catching us, which was why we had to climb into the boat at the end of the lawn.

After a few hours, our parents finally arrived home and were able to bring Emma back to the neighbors and get us out of the boat. If it wasn’t for the three of us friends being together during that time, and being able to laugh about what happened and continue to get through it with laughter; we definitely would have been a lot more scared and in tears throughout that whole situation. Laughter helped make this situation a lot easier to deal with and helped get us through the wait for our parents, and all around will always be a funny/great memory of getting stuck with my two best friends.