One time I flew down to the Bahamas with a friend to bring back my boat which had been in the shop, (It had conked out on me while on vacation a few weeks earlier). It was a long 260 mile trip home, but the water was very smooth with little wind, and the trip was rather monotonous and boring riding along on auto pilot. We made good time, and finally entered the final 82 mile stretch of our trip and began crossing the Gulf Stream towards my home in the Florida Keys.
As we began our crossing I noticed a thunderstorm approaching on the boat’s radar screen. In the summertime it’s quite common to have thunderstorms pop-up here and there and this storm was not unusual. It was a very large ominous looking thunderstorm, but it posed no danger as it was only moving about ten miles an hour and we were moving forty.
I knew it would be no problem whatsoever to avoid it, but I decided to break the monotony of the trip and have a little fun with my buddy, (who was a complete novice to boating and blue water fishing and knew nothing of summertime thunderstorms in the Gulf Stream).
I began my ruse by frantically looking at my radar screen and then glancing at the approaching storm with a worried expression on my face. I zoomed in on the storm on the screen which made our boat appear to be a tiny dot in relation to it. I looked at it with my most apprehensive expression and muttered, “This ain’t good – This ain’t good at all!”
My buddy looked terrified. He’d been closely watching my every move and kept frantically glancing towards the dark menacing looking storm which loomed off to our right, and back down at the screen, and then back at my uneasy expression. He said, “What? What’s wrong?”
I turned to him and looked him in the eye with a deadly serious expression and said, “I don’t see any way to avoid it, the darn thing’s moving too fast. I’m worried about the lightning strikes”, and I pointed to the screen which was saving and displaying at least a hundred yellow lightning bolts.
He got a worried look on his face and his eyes started getting big and he asked me what he was supposed to do in order to avoid getting hit. I told him the best advice I could give him was to pray. I told him second to that that he should get to the lowest point of the boat and curl up in the fetal position.
I casually mentioned that these storms were invariably preceded by a huge “wall of water” which was pushed up by the powerful winds generated by the storm that would be howling along at fifty or sixty miles an hour at the leading edge of the storm. I stated that our first hurdle would be to survive that huge first wave of the storm surge, and then of course the lightning.
I slowly shook my head, “You better get your life jacket on right now. Hopefully we’ll make it through without sinking, but I’d say we have at least a 50-50 chance to survive. All things considered those are actually pretty good odds when you consider the size of that storm.”
By now my buddy’s eyes were even wider and a very serious look was on his face. He was standing there with jaws clenched in the hot sun wearing his orange life jacket, (which had to be exceedingly hot in the humid summer sun).
I don’t know what possessed me, but I suddenly pounded on the console and shouted, “Crap, something is wrong with one of the boat engines! What else can go wrong? “This ain’t good – This ain’t good at all!”
(I felt this was a particularly nice twist because my boat had been in Marsh Harbour in the Abacos for a month getting the engines repaired whereby they had failed a month earlier on vacation. Perfect!)
Without my buddy’s knowledge I’d eased the throttle back a little on one of the engines and I pointed to the RPM gauge and muttered, “Just what we need, no power when we’re facing a wall of water!”
I grimly looked at him and somberly declared, “If we lose power in this storm we’re “done”.
By now my buddy was white as a ghost and muttering to himself. We rode along for a couple of miles with him wildly looking at the radar screen, (which I’d turned to animate mode which made the huge storm appear as to be rapidly moving directly towards us on a continuous loop). The screen was covered in deep purple, red, yellow, and green colors (similar to what is seen on television weather updates) and with the high clouds it appeared to be stretching nearly to our boat which was readily visible on the screen. It seemed to confirm that we were “goners”.
Finally after about fifty miles of this, we began pulling away from the storm. I couldn’t contain it anymore and started laughing like a Hyena and finally told him the truth.
Initially he was not amused, but eventually he saw the twisted humor in it, and we had a good laugh together.
I thought of a Bible verse in Proverbs that states: “Do not devise evil against your neighbor”. Was my act evil? Was this deception a work of satan? Naw I think it was just a little good-natured fun, but then again I found the verse below and maybe the Lord just might be telling me something. Shame on me . . . Ha Ha Ha
Proverbs 12:15
The way of a fool is right in his own eyes