It didn’t look too difficult. There was no way all those couples out there romantically sailing their rented Hobie Cats had done it before… No way. So of course, when the man at the Hamilton Island rentals kiosk asked us if we knew how to sail one, we assured him we were perfectly capable.

“Are you sure you know how? I don’t want to have to bring the rescue boat out for you two…”

“Positive. We’ve sailed a few times,” we told him.

Little did he know that by,”sailed a few times” we meant that Claire’s dad took her sailing over ten years ago and Laura had a five minute encounter with a Hobie Cat in the Carribean.

We strapped on our lifejackets and made our way over to one of the unused mini sailboats, confident that we’d be automatic professionals at the seemingly easy sport.

The moment we set sail, we realized that we literally had no idea what we were doing. Claire took control of the steering and Laura was in charge of the sail. For about the first ten minutes, we were moving incredibly slow while watching these happy honeymooners fly by with the wind. After multiple frantic attempts of  tightening the sail and moving the steering rod, we caught a huge gust of wind which put us in a series of unfortunate events…

The sudden movement caused the rope to slip out of Laura’s hands, which then caused the sail to smack right into Claire’s face at full wind gust speed of about 500mph. She flew backwards, clinging onto the boat for dear life. As we were speeding past all the other sailers, Laura tried to pull the sail back in as quick as possible in hopes of slowing us down. Then… THUD! We crashed into a buoy and our boat came to a halt. We were stuck…

The rescue boat rode up to help us and they kindly informed us that our rudder wasn’t in the proper position. Meaning, not under the water.

We were on our way thinking we finally had it all under control after the embarrassing scenario. After thirty minutes of randomly catching gusts of wind and randomly not moving, the rescue boat came back over to us. We were slightly confused because we didn’t think we were doing anything wrong. Apparently we were, though… He came to warn us that we were in danger of capsizing so we needed to have better control of the sail (that was Laura’s job….. *cough* *cough*)

This time we both really did have the Hobie Cat in our control (we promise). We were finally able to relax, enjoy the scenery, and even watch a wedding ceremony that was on the beach.

Has a little white lie ever led you into a crazy/scary situation like ours?