The Island | Marjorie Riches

My family and I went fishing one day in Valdez Alaska. It was my mom, my dad, my cousin Miranda and her husband Todd, their two big rotwieler dogs, and me. We took out two different boats so that we would be able to carry more fish. Valdez is on the coast of Alaska and is a great place for deep sea fishing. So we fished and we fished and we fished. We didn't stop fishing until about six in the evening. We had all caught a ton of fish. Now, I don't know how much you know about gutting fish, but we all knew that you can't gut fish in salt water. Unfortunately this presented a problem, we were in the ocean and it was all Salt Water. So we rode around in the boats for a little while until we found a little island that had a freshwater stream running through it. My dad said that this would be a perfect place to gut the fish. So we gutted and we gutted, until all of the fish were cleaned out and ready to cook. We then walked back to our boats and found them on their sides, with nothing but land surrounding them. The tide had gone out while we were gutting, leaving us stranded on this island. These weren't little boats either, they were huge so there was no way we could push them to the water. We were stuck and it was starting to get dark. We decided to build a fire and thought that it would be kind of fun to have a little campout on the beach...with no tent, or way to keep warm, or food. We were all fine though until we saw them. Little glowing eyes in the woods next to the stream where we had gutted our fish. Great, there were bears on the island. All of a sudden our little campout didn't seem so fun. We stayed around the campfire though because if there is one thing that hates people as much as we hate them, it's bears. They also hate noise so my mom, being the positive woman that she is, suggested that we start singing camp songs. The bears disappeared for a while and we sat singing songs by the fire. Eventually we ran out of songs to sing and there was a lull in our conversations. My cousin and I fell asleep while everyone else sat quietly talking. I opened my eyes a while later to hear a hush. Everyone had fallen asleep. The fire was still burning dimly. I looked out in the forest and saw beady eyes staring back at me, glowing by the light of the fire. I could barely get it out, but I managed to yell, "BEARS!" and woke everyone up. The dogs that were with us took off and jumped in the boat. So much for brave rotwielers. I was quick to follow their lead however, and so was everyone else. We all decided that camping out in the boats was a better idea than camping on the beach. So we sat in the boats and waited and waited for the tide to come in. It was pitch black by the time it finally did and we all wanted nothing more than to get back to our warm beds. So we set out. Each boat had a spotlight and a GPS system so that we could find our way back to the dock easily. It was freezing cold as the arctic water sprayed up on the boat and we tore through the ocean. We could see Miranda and Todd's boat beside us. Then, all of a sudden they were gone. We slowed down and stopped our boat, turning around to look for them. They were nowhere to be seen. We decided that they must have gotten ahead of us, but they had a GPS and light so they would be fine. We started up again and were going along at a speedy pace when my dad mumbled quietly, the GPS just went out. Great, I knew now that we were either going to freeze to death or hit something and die. We would never find our way back. Just then in the distance we saw a light! We all thought the same thing, it must be the dock! So we sped away toward it. My mom, who was holding the spotlight, suddenly yelled really loudly "ROCKS!" My dad made a sharp turn and I thought that the boat was going to flip, but we avoided the rocks and we didn't flip. The light turned out to be a lighthouse. We drove around for w hile longer and eventually saw several lights that we knew had to be shore. We were finally right. When we got there, Todd and Miranda were freaking out. They had no idea where we had disappeared off to. But we were all safe and went to sleep as soon as we got back to our home. If we survived that night, we knew that we could survive anything.