How I got over my fear of boats (by getting thrown off of one)

My boyfriend has a phobia of spiders. Not just a fear of spiders, a full-fledged phobia, to the point I'm not even really allowed to joke about it. I still give him some shit for it. Because c'mon, tiny spiders.

I think it's a stupid fear, but I can't throw stones, because I had my own stupid fear. I recovered from it, but it was a very stupid fear. I was afraid of boats.

The smaller the boat, the more afraid of it I was. Big ferries were okay; you drove right on and if you didn't look out the windows too much and just stared at the snack bar you could pretend you weren't really on a boat. Also, ferries have lots of safety signs and the little safety presentation at the start of the route and all that stuff that is really essentially the same as what's on smaller boats, but it made me feel safer.

Little boats though just tip over and fling you into the water to drown and I wasn't having any of that. Nuh uh.

I remember as a kid when the Lady Washington was in port. She's my favorite tallship, and she sails up and down Puget Sound and the coasts of Washington, Oregon, and California, usually with her sister The Hawaiian Chieftain. I first saw her as the Enterprise on Star Trek: Generations. She was also the HMS Interceptor on Pirates of the Caribbean, the Jolly Roger on the show Once Upon a Time, and she's in a Macklemore music video.

(Pro tip: If you ever visit these two ships, ask one of the crew from the Lady Washington to go over her filmography, then immediately turn around and ask a crewmate from the Hawaiian Chieftain what fame their ship can claim. Most of them will roll their eyes and walk away from you, but the really defensive ones will enthusiastically explain that that Hawaiian Chieftain was once filmed for a commercial that never aired, but dammit they brought out a real film crew and everything for it so it still counts!)

Here is a picture of both boats I took a few years ago:

Hawaiian Chieftain in the foreground, Lady Washington in the back.

I've since been on both these ships multiple times, but my first encounter I was too afraid to go on the boat. My parents were super-confused. I refused to go on that boat, though. The bilge pump was pumping water out, which my mom explained is a perfectly normal thing boats need to do, but I was absolutely convinced it mean the boat was leaking and was going to sink into the harbor just as soon as I stepped foot on it. So I stood on the dock with my mom while my dad and brother paid the suggested donation to go up on the boat and take the tour.

A few years later, my fear of boats was only worse, and my Girl Scout troop was going on a whitewater rafting trip. No fucking way, no thank you, go have fun, bye. That trip had everything I didn't want: tiny boat, rough waters, getting wet. Ick. Nope. Hell nah.

My troop sisters refused to leave me behind, though, so they played on my fear of missing out. What about the road trip over the mountains? What about the camping? What about exploring Winthrop? What if...what if...I just sat out the boat ride and did all the other stuff?

I was still like "nah", but I think my mom was fed up with what she thought (rightly) was a stupid fear, so she basically made me go. I think it was something along the lines of "Go on this trip, or dust all the cupboards in the kitchen" or some shit like that. So I went.

Here, I need to back up and explain a few things about my old Girl Scout troop (and then copy-paste this for all the future stories to share about them). You see, we were not the goody-goody well-behaved girls. Totem Council, as it was known at the time (now it's Girl Scouts of Western Washington), actually tried to disband our troop. They took one look at our roster and were like "Hell no, you can't put those girls together, they'll cause mayhem!" and did everything they could to try and make our troop no longer a troop. See, we're the troop that would go to a weekend encampment and ditch the planned activities to go off and TP cabins and shit like that (actually, fishing line cabins, but I'll explain that another day).

We ultimately drove our first troop leader to quit. When one of the parents took over, they discovered said leader had left our troop several hundred dollars in debt. We were a high school troop with maybe a dozen girls at the most by that point, so we weren't cute enough or large enough to raise sufficient funds just selling cookies. We needed bigger fundraisers, so we did stuff like throwing Halloween parties and tea parties and larger-scale events for the other troops in the region. When the council discovered that we could, in fact, act mature and throw on cool events for the younger girls, they started to get off our case. My BFF actually runs the old troop now (she has about 40 girls) and she organizes most of the events for the region as well, so the tradition has continued. At the time we still were shit-disturbers, though, but we were tolerated shit-disturbers (and having been to fundraisers for BFFs troop and meeting the girls, I'm very pleased to say the next generation is following our footsteps well).

Back to the rafting trip. Somehow, fear-of-missing-out pushed out phobia, and I ended up on a raft going down the Methow River somewhere near Winthrop, WA. I was seated right up in the "splash zone", which was the first two rows. I was nervous as hell when we set off.

I had a blast, though!

Our troop was on one raft, and there were two other groups rafting with us as well. It was a full-day affair, with a stop for lunch halfway down. Our guide was a young, laid-back guy who at first did not seem thrilled to be assigned to the raft full of Girl Scouts. He started off on his best behavior, because Girl Scouts and rules and all that. How little he realized then...

We were nice to him, at first. We kindly asked if we could get closer to the other rafts "to say hi to them". Our guide shrugged and began steering us toward them.

I should also note that our troop was more of a "high adventures" troop. At the time, Girl Scouts were trying to improve dwindling enrollment among older girls with a "charm" program where instead of badges, you got a charm bracelet with charms for shit like fashion design, crafting, writing, and that sort of stuff. Our troop was pissed about that program, because we wanted to go camping, hiking, climbing, etc. There was lots of canoeing and kayaking, not by me, but by others. Our troop leader also knew how to steer a raft. We weren't into that other stuff. We were into outdoor adventure, big time. That is what we lived for. (A quick Google search seems to indicate that the charm program, thankfully, seems to have died as well.)

So our shit-starting troop let our raft guide take us up to one of the other rafts to say "hi". We did this by grabbing our paddles and splashing the fuck out of them, then we turned and paddled the fuck away. Our guide was shocked, to say the least. We were paddling hard, and our leader took over steering, and our guide was like WTF?!?!  He didn't know how to cope, but the devious grin on his face told us he was getting a kick out it too.

Yes, the guide started getting in on it. At one point, he decided to start splashing us, so we threw him off the raft. That really shocked him. "No one's ever done that," he said with a dumbfounded stare. He simply couldn't process that had actually happened.

With the guide off the raft, there was a lot of shoving and pushing as we started throwing each other off the raft, and in the fray, I ended up going over and into the water.

Here's the big thing: I was fine. It was a calm, non-whitewatery portion of the river. I bobbed around floating downstream for a bit, then climbed back in the boat. My greatest fear had been realized, and it was absolutely nothing bad.

That ended up being one of the most fun weekends of my life. If I had given into my fear, I would have missed out on all of that. Going on that trip was absolutely worth it. I wasn't afraid of boats after that, and I've been on several since. Here's some photographic proof from a year and a half ago when my class chartered a sailboat after summer finals:

That's me. On a boat.

Scorpions though, those fuckers are scary. Don't get me started on those.