Lost at Sea, Featuring Ari the Devil
By Ari Oysgelt
“I want to go on the paddle boat,” I said to my dad, pointing at the paddle boat at a boat rental stand on the beach.
I was on a beach in Spain with my family. We were on summer break and came from London. It was a tiring journey because I got stung by a jellyfish, endured sweltering heat, and had trouble speaking Spanish. I was around 10 at the time and extremely annoying (not that I am not annoying now).
“Ok, but you will have to go alone with your brother,” said my dad, and he rented it for us.
My dad went to the rental stand and we looked at the options. I chose the one with a slide.
So me and my brother went on the paddle boat and paddled off into the sea. I asked my brother
“Please go down the slide” I said to him not wanting to go down myself. But he refused, so I pushed him down (the devil strikes again).
When he came back up, he said we were in a coral graveyard. I looked down and saw a bunch of dead coral and some colorful fish (alive, luckily).
We kept paddling on when suddenly a few gusts of wind blew us off course. My brother and I frantically tried to paddle back but the wind pushed us back to sea. My brother was frantically crying, annoying me. His cries were ringing in my ears. I, being the devil I am, pushed him off the boat. He screamed and started climbing back up onto the boat.
When he came back up he stammered, “I saw some big orange fish with spikes on it.”So I looked down into the water and I saw a lionfish swimming. I started paddling away fast but the wind kept pushing us in weird directions.
Later, after the wind stopped, we saw a beach. My brother and I thought it was the beach we were originally on. So we paddled and paddled and paddled until we were only 100 feet away from the beach. We could see more clearly, and we saw that this was the wrong beach. We saw that there was a different beach hut and it looked more fancier. We were not smart enough to realize that we should have gone to that beach and asked for help.
We tried to paddle along the shore to get back to the original beach, but the wind pushed us back farther into the sea. My brother kept on crying and crying and crying so I pushed him off again, and when he tried to come back up, I pushed him off again and again and again until he pulled me into the water. The water was cold and numbed me. A ton of salt water got in my mouth. It tasted salty (I’m such a poet). I tried to climb back onto the boat but failed. The second try I got onto the boat and then yelled at my brother.
We were crying on the boat when a family also on a paddleboat saw us and started paddling to us and started helping us.
“Hello, do you need help,” they said to us and we said yes. So they started paddling us back to the right beach.
“Can we use the slide?” The mom asked us, and of course we agreed
They were paddling us back to the beach, when we saw my dad on a canoe. He said the company we rented the boat from lent him the canoe to help find us. He picked us up, and then we went back to the beach and all was well.
This experience was a huge nightmare for me and has been stuck in my head forever. It is a big part of my identity because it is the worst experience I have ever experienced in my life.
