How I Raced a Speed Boat and Won

This is a water color I painted this morning of our kayak in the storm.  You can only see the nose of the kayak as a giant wave is threatening to capsize it.

When I was eight,  I raced a speedboat in my kayak and I won. 

I was with my dad and my two brothers who were born at that time.  I have another brother now.  We were in a three seater, yellow kayak with my youngest brother on my dad's lap.  We were paddling out to an island, sure that my mom would arrive there before us in the motor boat..  Just then, a storm broke out. 

We weren't able to tell where we were going through the thick rain.  The waves were giant, I thought that our kayak was going to flip over.  The wind howled like a wolf in the night and the rain pounded against our kayak like hammers against stone.

It felt weird that I wasn't cold, but I guess I do live in the tropics. Our kayak rolled over the waves, up and down, up and down, like the streets of San Francisco in the earthquake of 1906.

My dad paddled as hard as he could, but we couldn't keep straight. When the rain cleared, we found ourselves very close to the island.  We weren't over the reef yet, but we could see it, a sliver of green against a blue/grey
 ocean . 

We had won.  My mom came a few minutes later on the moter boat.

This is a picture of the bay where we launched,  beyond that distant sandbar is the open Bismark Sea, and the island