by Matt Parker  

The two-man dinghy unceremoniously sank out from beneath us, becoming an eery shadow in the depths below.  Immediately, the looks on my four best friends faces flushed cold white. Faces that had been warm with laughter hours earlier were now ashen. 

Puget Sound water in front of Three Tree Point, like most of it, is cold all year long. It was 1999. We were seventeen years old. Maybe we should have been experimenting with parties and drag racing our cars.  This was not the case as we hung on to our yearly summer ritual of building a Huckleberry Finn raft well into high school.  That year the raft had been bigger than any other.  

With little fear and plenty of moxie, we launched our raft to tow it to Seahurst Park. Safety first was not in our vocabulary then. We successfully landed our raft and headed back to the beaches of Normandy Park. It was dusk.  Five young men and some light personal gear in a two-person dinghy. Math and common sense did not add up at the time. 

We were doing okay until we got around the Point and lost our balance with the tidal shift.
Almost 30 percent of the upcoming Kennedy High School varsity basketball team, including me, were left bobbing around in the Puget Sound, in the dark, after our dinghy sunk. “It’s over,” we thought, our lives were lost in that shipping channel one-half mile from the beaches we loved. Life preservers?..nah. Swim fins?…nah. Treading water and yelling at the top of our desperate lungs?…yes.

One raft builders family could hear our screaming from their home on the border of Gregory Heights on 25th Avenue Southwest.  When his dad came looking for us in another boat, he only found our gear, floating in bedlam, and a submerged dinghy that had drifted.  He still tells us he felt a heart attack coming on. We drifted too, finally being rescued by a god send in a row boat we wish we could recall now. 

We were as close to hypothermic as possible without becoming human Otter Pops, we were lined up by the authorities on shore.  I can’t remember, for sure, if they were policemen or firemen.  At that point, I literally couldn’t remember my name when they asked for it.

That was calm summer water, warm air temperatures, and a two mile journey that prompted a Coast Guard worthy rescue (we were told the Coast Guard had been mobilized to find us).  Besides the obvious danger, the poor judgement we executed that day has always bothered me.  Luck and divine providence dictated we all made it safely home, and back to summer basketball, healthily warmed up.