seal island

I’ll give you a very brief synopsis. It capsized there was I was in a boat in South Africa in False bay off the coast of South Africa you know where seal island is where like the sharks hunting ground o great white sharks you know where the national geographic thing where where it breaches and gets the seal you know this yeah that’s where it is…anyways… the boat capsized and I was out there in a storm and like 12 foot waves … it was it was my friends boat and we were going out like to just like see the seals I was going to be back at a casting at like 6:30 – 7 o’clock sundown but the boat capsized long story I was in inside . it was a hard bodied catamaran 27 foot boat so I was kind of in the covered part when it flipped and… this is where the story becomes very long… there is a lot of details a lot of details to the story… but at any rate it flipped and I was inside and the cabin was filling …well there was a moment when when i … where the captain stepped outside of the covered area and I was inside there was 4 people so it was his boat so and and and I actually had my hand on the wheel because it was like 2 seconds he was like hold this don’t move anything and I looked to the.. and I looked and I could see out and I just saw a wave cresting us and we were broadside so that was we were broadside to a wave and you just cant do that so that and so woop we flipped over … so I was like we are going to capsize and ½ second later I’m underwater next thing I know I come out the bottom of the boat is on top of my head and the water is here you know and its rising and its rising its just like like this its like some fucking strange fucked up movie and but the the crazy… I love I love this part… there is like a few parts of the story that are so fucking hilarious like which is like, its like yeah yeah now I can separate myself for it but like the fact that as the water is rising I don’t have any logical thoughts like at the end there where a couple of thoughts that mostly its just like fuck fick fuck fuck like couldn’t think any thing else it was so crazy until the very end where the water was like up here and I thought um I cant die drowning um, I have to swim I thought of my mother and I thought of my boyfriend at that time and like I then I don’t remember like I know I swam towards the direction of what I thought was out and I the next thing I remember I don’t remember that part of getting out from underneath the boat but I came up quite far from the boat you know like 20 feet 30 feet from the boat and I swam back to the boat and I got up on the boat and there were the 3 other people he had already collected the life vests. which we didn’t have them on at he time but he collected them from the… but he didn’t get the flare and so then we were like it was at sunset and then what ever we were caught on we broke loose of we went out into the break which was like you know 12 feet you know or what ever waves and then the boat was like a loose surf board we are on the bottom of it and we got a crawfishing, I guess crawfishing net or a lobster net something like if the boat were upright it would hang underneath the boat and there is like a circle and a net and you put bait in there I guess they come in there and like I don’t know how it works at any rate it was upside down like this is another one of the moments this is another one of the fucking hilarious moments. It was me Georgio, Alexandra and Alexandro there Italian 2 Italians and a german girl and me that is who was in the accident these are the people in the boat Alexandro got hit by the boat when he… uh when it all flipped they were all outside they all got thrown form the boat and the boat kind of landed on him I guess and his shoulder was like out he was like you know it was fucked up. He was bleeding the most of all of us and then um …so were kind of stuck and then we get unstuck like you know and then we start drifting toward these big waves and everyone is sort of silent we’ve all sort of being trying to like sort of talk it will be okay, we’ll figure…some one will see us or whatever anyways so we’re like drifting and then I I start going “Georgio, um we’re going towards those waves there,” and he’s like, “Yeah um hum yeah I know.” And then I’m like “So that’s um that’s going to be bad, yeah that’s that’s…” and he’s like, “Do I look like I have a fucking paddle Laura? “ I was like I was like “Yeah” and then we figured out, me and him, that that crawfishing thing was hanging over the front of the boat and he jumped in the water and he got the thing out and ran it down the middle of the boat so that when we hit the waves we could hold onto it hold on to the rope cause it like there’s the boat the catamaran the two hard bottom, its not like clear and then down the middle so what’s sticking out of the water is the two hulls and now we have these tree nylon ropes and like this thing at the end it doesn’t fucking matter um and you can hold onto it but like the girl for example the first wave that hit us right the boat goes like this vertical and the girl wrapped around the nylon thing around her hand like trying to keep hold on and it fucking just ripped the skin off her hand you know and myself I just got ripped down the thing cause you don’t know you don’t know how strong that wave is going to be you know and how much the water rushing down the middle of those two things is and keep in mind the water is fucking freezing ass cold so any like the coldest lake we’ve ever jumped in you know and we’ve all jumped in that you know have you ever jumped in water where it stops your fucking heart right so its like that over and over and over and over but it was the first time was when I got swept from the boat this is another one of those movie moments its fucking upright like horizontal like this and Georgio is holding the thing, I’ve slid down the thing, he’s got my life vest like this you know cause we’re like yeah yeah with me in it he’s holding it but he cant hold it at some moment he lets go I get swept from the boat I end up getting back to the boat fine you know but then it happens basically there is where I can make the story short this happens for like 6 or 7 hours until until the boat okay now we have to understand the layout of the land form like 6:30 from like sunset til like … I lost my phone… I have a bikini and a beach cover up and my bag and my passport and my phone was underwater …this went on til like the next day we didn’t get rescued until like 8 o’clock the next morning… no no this doesn’t end very soon. Believe me there are many many many times that night that I had this very same thought. “is this going to end anytime soon?” what the fuck … oh I have this massive fight with god in the middle of all this in the background there was the most massive fight with god. That I’ve ever had in my life . Oh yeah, he was speaking to me he was definitely speaking to me it really funny cause it was like the most calm calm way that I’ve ever heard like that kind of kind of like power or what ever I don’t know its like then its all for fuck sake it was all, so but anyways so this is happening … that was god, cause I had this continual sort of voice or whatever telling me that I would be ok. That I was gong to live. That I would just have to keep fighting and keep going and keep holding on like physically but also keep doing it and it was like calmly telling me it was going to beat the shit out of me or that I was just there like you know it’s the ocean what are you going to do? Ask it to stop? You know its so you just like that was my fight with god what it culminated in was um like a peace in powerlessness it being beaten but I mean but there is being beaten by a person and then there is being beaten by nature or something you know and there is a point where you have to stop fighting it like you can fight it, I was fighting the whole fucking time like believe me I wouldn’t be alive is I wasn’t fighting it but you stop fighting it in another way. And your just like okay here we are I guess I have to trust that this is going to end at some point and that I’ll be alive but right now I have fucking cold water and fucked up shit like happening so that’s that and then eventually we kind of crashed cause like seal island is not and island I love that it’s a rock it’s a fucking rock and it’s a sharp rock and it’s a stinky rock no the seals the seals piss on it and so it smells like ammonia and there are these whiskery hair wiry hair things all over it there whole body is covered with hair though, right? Its not like hair its very whisker like hair all over their body it just like very coarse and like whiskers its not fur it’s not it it but that’s all over the rocks anyway um the boat hit the rocks which are like its like a u-shaped kind of thing and then there are rocks around it the only way to get to it really is to crash the boat comes and then it gets like stuck and then like the waves pound it and a big enough one comes carries us closer and then it happens again and then at some point this is another movie moment at some point we ‘re fighting about whether to leave the boat which is now breaking apart because its been smashed against the rocks so many times you know, and all of us want to be out of the water but the option is to go onto this island with a colony of seals which the bull seals are like very big and not having it and so and and Georgio has been mauled by walruses and something’s he’s lived in South Africa for a while he’s the one who lived there lived there and so he is like he’s not going at first and then the other girl is like “I’m fucking going” and we’re like the other funny things is she’s screaming in german he’s screaming in italian and I’m screaming in english but then we finally end up Georgio funny enough was the one went and like waved the life jackets around got the seals to go so we could like I think at that time they realized that we were broken and not trying to hurt them or whatever and they just sort of stayed up there and let us lay down on the sharp pokey ammonia piss smelling whisker covered fucking rocks it’s just beautiful that they let us share there home but then so were there until a small fishing boat came and saw us in the morning they brought the coast guard they couldn’t get to us cause you cant get there with a boat you gotta crash there I guess and then they brought a helicopter. The Helicopter pilot picked us up in the end. he was he was I feel like I’m picking up ghosts there was like two of us that he picked up he has to pick us up in succession but he was like “I feel like I’m picking up ghosts. I probably should say this but you don’t pick up live people from here. You just pick up dead people from here.” It’s really had to get back into society when like… cause the other thing is you know everyone knows the moment where the bus almost hit me or the thing a more prolonged thing… this was like this times a hundred per hour … it’s a lot for your body to handle.