Share the story of a time you felt unsafe.
Ooo! I have another adventure to share. This time it involves my hubby, before he was my hubby, we were in the great state of Maine at the time. This is dating back to 1990, I believe that the month was June. I was working as the Catalog Coordinator of Conran's Habitat and our catalog team was on location at Bar Harbor Maine shooting our catalog at Cadillac Mountain and the surrounding Arcadia National Park. If ever any of you have a chance to visit Bar Harbor, I highly recommend it, it is unbelievably breathtaking, the vistas, the people, the food and the surrounding ocean with the whale watching and the lobster fishermen, simply glorious.
My hubby came up for the weekend because my team and I had been staying there for at least three weeks prior, shooting all of the furniture, accessories and linens everywhere outdoors within the Arcadia National Park, it was a challenging shoot but nothing ordinary ever happened during those days which made it so much fun. So when my hubby arrived, my bosses gave me the weekend free and my hubby decided that we should rent a boat to go motoring around the coastline. I thought what fun!
We went to the harbor, found the boat rentals shop and my hubby spoke to the man, got the map, actually said that the map was very limited in scope but the man assured us that we would have more than enough to see within those parameters so off we went. I know that I have described my hubby as one of the most prepared person's that I have ever met and that day he didn't disappoint. We started our outing with a compass and a waterproof jacket just in case.
My hubby got the boat out of the harbor and we hugged the coastline, following the map as we went or so we thought. The sky was a clear powder blue and we were admiring the beautiful homes right off the shore with their private beaches and while we were consulting the map figuring out where exactly we were, the thickest fog that I had seen up until then, rolled in out of nowhere.
We couldn't see in front of us so my hubby turned us around or thought that he did and we motored onward trying to find the opening to the harbor. That fog was what we had seen in scary movies and it was so very cold, it felt like a wet thick blanket on our skin and we started shivering almost immediately. My hubby thinking that he had found the opening to the harbor went inwards and we stumbled upon a huge sailboat. I spoke up and made my almost hubby stop and ask for directions, this is when we found out that we had veered completely off the map. We were nowhere near the harbor, so with new directions and a solid indication as to where to point our compass towards, we were off. At one point we saw a couple of lobster fishermen who yelled at us "watch out for the ……." we never figured out what they had meant. We then passed a whale watching boat, that was a little scary because meeting up with a whale would have done us in, if our boat had been capsized. It was not looking good for us for a little while, we were frozen, we weren't sure if we were going to have enough fuel to get back and we weren't sure if we were still on the right path, but somehow five hours after we had left, we made it into the harbor.
When we stumbled out of the boat and into the rental shop, the owner said that five more minutes and he was going to call the coast guard to rescue us. We thanked him and went into our car, sat inside and put the heat on maximum, it took what felt like hours to defrost from that damp bitter cold.
That was a crazy adventure, one for the family story book, but definitely not an adventure that I would ever want to live through again.
laurieanichols 