I knew you would enjoy the Henley Festival post about drunken river activities, but for this tale we were completely sober but inexperienced. We bought the two year old motor cruiser soon after moving to Henley, she was called 'Aquila' we kept the same name in the end as we liked it. On our first outing I had been joking about falling in but everyone said oh! no, nobody falls off big boats it would be dangerous. I had just moved from sailing and windsurfing to this gentler pursuit of river cruising. We had on all the right gear including life jackets which may have seemed a bit over the top but we knew water safety was important. We cruised down stream to Henley town and alongside the River and Rowing club we stopped to moor up.This was Malc's first time at mooring up and if he had been under sail there would have been no problem but it took him a couple of runs to get near the landing pontoon. As we approached he shouted for me to ''jump now'' which I did with the mooring rope in my hand. Sadly I caught the back of my life jacket on a cleat on the side of the boat and ended up suspended in mid air. I screamed to Malc to help and he rushed to my aid. In the meantime the boat was drifting away from the mooring. Malc quickly unhooked me from the cleat and I plopped straight down in to the river. Now listen, I have spent many times in seas and rivers around the world, 'fearless Val in water, that's me', but a man walking his dog along the tow path did not know this and he bravely threw himself in and swam to rescue me. He then insisted on dragging me to the bank by my life jacket. Oh, gosh the embarrassement, when we were on shore, Malc was still taking runs trying to land and I was telling the man I was OK and could have managed, but he was having none of it. He had rescued a damzel in distress and fair do's he wanted his moment of glory and thanks. So I changed to simpering thank you's and he seemed happy. Our big worry was that it would all be reported in our local paper the Henley Standard as quite a crowd had gathered by the end of it all, and if there had been a picture as well - the shame.
The lesson I learnt from this accident was always have a spare pair of dry knickers on board every trip!
Any homesickness I had, has now disappeared so back now to stories and news about France.
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