That Time We Flipped The Boat

This year's Camp Retz was a little more eventful than I would have preferred.

As the boys get older and stronger and more adventurous, the harder we (Jimmy and and his brother Steve) have to work at keeping up to their level.
This is their friend catching air.

Normally when you're on a tube behind a boat, the fun is hanging out back there and go as fast as you dare, but for the most part, just enjoying the ride.
It's still like that with the youngest nephew.

But the goal with the oldest nephews, who are now 12 and 14, is to whip them around back and forth as sharply and quickly as possible to try to dump them into the lake, while they try their hardest to hang on.


Reggie is 5'11" now, so it's gotten easier to dump him because he's taller and his weight works against. It's still very challenging because he's an athlete and is really strong and fast.

But Jakee is still nimble and small enough to be able to maneuver himself on the tube very quickly, adjusting his weight to the sharp turns.

This year, we were towing Jakee behind the boat, and did a sharp turn and hit our own wake at the perfectly wrong angle and within split seconds, the boat was upside down.

Thankfully everyone was fine. No injuries at all. My biggest panic as i was under water, was the boys. We had 2 boys on our boat, Reggie and his 15 year old friend. Jimmy was piloting the boat, and I was facing backwards taking photos of Jakee. It's funny the different perspectives we all have. I was sitting on the side that went in first, and it was sooo sooo fast. I didn't even know it was happening because I was concentrating on taking photos of Jake. The next thing I knew, I was in the water under the boat. Jimmy and the boys said it felt like slow motion as their side of the boat slowly flipped over. The boys were in the front of the boat and they jumped/dove into the water away from the boat as it was flipping. Thank God! They were never under the boat, which is such a huge relief to me. Jimmy's side flipped over me, but we never saw each other under there. He said he felt the railing and just pulled himself out from under the railing and was out. I had to crawl my way out from under. I was told I was the last one to come up. I was never worried that I wouldn't get out or drown, but I was definitely on survival instinct because I needed to make sure the boys were ok. That was all I could think of while i was under water...get out to make sure everyone is ok. I'm pretty sure as I surfaced, I took count, saw everyone, and asked "is everyone ok??" And they all were.

Jakee was the safest since he was quite a distance from the boat. He thought he just fell of the tube like usual, and never saw any of the action ahead of him because it all happened as he was falling off. When he looked up, he didn't see the boat and was super confused before realizing the boat capsized.
This is the last photo I took.
You can see the water overloading the front of Jake's tube, which made him fall in. I was snapping photos as the boat flipped.

The youngest nephew was on shore with his mom and dad. They saw it all happen and Steve immediately got in his boat to rescue. I can't imagine what they thought as they watched the boat flip. He was there within 90 seconds. When he got to us, we were laughing and retelling our stories. He was very happy to see all of us fine and even joking around. The boys quickly got onto his boat. Jimmy, Steve and I assessed what might have fallen to the bottom of the lake and what was crucial to recover. Like the keys to the car. Which I thought for sure were at the bottom of the lake because they were in my backpack, but we were relieved to find it floating under the boat.

We hooked our boat to Steve's and towed it to the dock. It was very challenging towing it because of the drag. It pulled Steve's boat in unexpected directions making navigating difficult. But we finally got it there. Reggie, Jakee and their friend went to get Max and Danny and all of our stuff from where we camped out for the day. In the meantime, Steve and Jimmy and 2 helpful strangers tried to upright our boat. It took a while, but they finally got a heavy duty recovery strap, hooked it to the hitch on our car and the far side of the boat, and got it upright.

We did lose a few things, and my camera and cell phone were damaged beyond repair, but the only thing that mattered was that everyone was ok.

And the boys had a great story to tell when they went back to school in August.

Here's a video from the GoPro that was attached to the back of the boat. It was filming the boys on the tube. We don't have any photos of the tow back to the dock, or uprighting the boat, because...well...my camera and cell phones were both water logged. I was able to recover the photos from the camera card though, so yay for that!


We've definitely learned a lot from this. We had the best outcome for something that could have been so much worse, and for that I am eternally grateful. The boys realize it was a big deal, not just another adventure. It was an actual boating accident. And we'll be piloting the boat more cautiously.
And remember to always wear your life jacket.

11.18 Videos of our Mining Towns Ride

Chemung Mine:


If the videos aren't already shown in HD, you'll want to change it to 1080p by clicking on the gear icon on the bottom right of the video. So much prettier.

Quaking Aspens.
One of my favorite sounds in the world. This quick little video doesn't come close to the sound or what it looks like, but I still had to try to capture it.


The full ride from start to finish. 9 hours in about 7 minutes.

Rhino ride in a Thunderstorm

When Jimmy took the boys out for their annual off-road ride on the Rhino they got caught in a major thunderstorm and were soaked through to the bone. Maybe it wasn't so fun while it was happening, but they sure loved watching the video and reminiscing and laughing about it that night after they were warm, dry and fed.


Here's a front view of their ride:

Mount Lewis

Our 2nd and last ride of our staycation was up Mount Lewis, a nearby peak to our hideaway. We didn't get out till 4pm again, so we wanted to stay close rather than going up to the high country.While we were up at the peak, we had a 270º view of the high country and
the gold country foothills and central valley.

We actually came across a big black bear on this adventure! It was the highlight of the ride. But he ran away fast as soon as he heard our loud machine. We watched him run away on the trail for about 10 seconds till he scampered down the mountainside far away from us. I didn't have my big camera at the ready and in the GoPro, he looks so far away, you can't make him out to be more than a brown blur.

Here's another quick time lapse video we shot. I did a lot of editing out, since most of the trails were very similar...trees trees and more trees. Beautiful to be amongst, but redundant in a video. We accidentally left the camera on while we drove back to the cabin, so I left that in since we've never shot video of that before, along with the running around we do to tie the atv down to the trailer after our ride. Just a little something different from all the other forest ride videos I've been posting. Plus it's a lot shorter, less than 1.5 minutes.


and here's a closeup of the moo cows we came across. I'm not sure what the appeal is to running into cows in the forest, but we both seem to enjoy seeing them whenever we're out on an offroad adventure.

Wright's Creek Ride

We're still at the hideaway, doing more work on the remodel than playing, but when we play, we do it right.

Yesterday, we finally got out to play. We didn't leave till 4pm, but even thought it was later than we wanted to get out, it ended up being the perfect timing because we caught an amazing sunset as we were heading back to the car.

We were out on the trails exploring the forest for about an hour when we were both surprised by the view to our left. A very cool waterfall running down a rocky cliff. We learned when we got home that it was Wright's Creek, which feeds into the Tuolumne River.

It was already after 6pm, so we decided to eat our dinner right then and there and enjoy the view.

You probably know that there are lots and lots of bugs in the forest. Since our atv has no windshield, the bugs constantly hit our face and helmets, especially since it's spring and there seem to be even more buggies in the springtime. I don't like bugs in my teeth. But apparently, Jimmy doesn't seem to mind.

We stumbled on a spot where they were doing some logging. We realized that was another good reason to be out exploring in the forest after 5pm, when all the dangerous logging trucks are off our dirt trails.


We were out for about 4 hours when we decided to head back to the car when we came across a vista point and saw the sun setting so we stopped and watched it go down below the horizon. A great ending to our 1st ride of the season.

Here's another video Jimmy and I made of our entire ride where we combined over 3000 GoPro photos into a 4 1/2 minute video.

The Drive

We've gotten in the habit of putting our GoPro camera on our dashboard and taking either video or a photo of the trip every 5 seconds. When we get home, Jimmy combines all those images, this time over 3000 before the battery died, into a video. Then I take it, edit out the long pauses when we stop and nothing is changing, do a bit of cropping so the car is mostly out of frame and finding music that's approximately the same length of the video and sort of matches the mood/theme/pace of it.

Here's our video from our Memorial Day Drive with our friend John.
click on the 'youtube' icon on the bottom right of the video to make it bigger.

Point Bonita and Back

Our 4 hour trip condensed into 2 1/2 minutes.
Hope you don't get carsick.

The Desert

Last weekend, my cousin and I drove down to Southern California to visit the desert town where we grew up.

I hadn't been back in 8 years and she in almost 15. It was a good trip, but a hard trip, facing some ghosts but finally putting them at rest. I left feeling at peace with the desert, rather than the anxiety I've always felt towards it. Her story may or may not be a little different, but that's not mine to tell.

For the first time since...ever...I could actually see a little bit of beauty in the landscape, rather than just the ugly, desolate brown. This is the view I saw every day growing up. That strange mountain range with that odd divot cut out of it always fascinated me for some reason. I seem to remember thinking that some big alien monster came and took a big bite out of it.

Here's a video of the drive down the road I lived on.

Sometimes I have to pinch myself to prove that it's real that I came from this extremely rural area to living in a big urban city like San Francisco. I've never felt connected to the desert. The Bay Area is where I belong.

Speedy drive to Point Reyes

I got a new camera for Christmas that's ideal for action videos. We'll probably mostly use it at the hideaway on the Rhino, but we decided to play around with it during our drive up to Point Reyes last week. this is a super sped up version of various clips of the drive up.
Click on the "Full Screen" icon at the bottom right of the video to get a better view.