Please fasten your sanity

Our catamaran and kayak adventures, though fraught with danger in the form of excessive personal contact with nature, nevertheless spurred us into engaging in further boating adventures on our vacation. These included a ride on a Jet Ski, more generically known as a "personal watercraft," which sounds like something to fold up and put in your pocket to carry around for convenient, instant use: "Oh, look, here's some water. Let's get out our personal watercraft."

The Jet Ski is more affectionately known by me as the Ride of Terror.

My only previous experience on a Jet Ski, with a friend, involved a very comfortable, safe ride, as if we had been charged with safely transporting several cartons of eggs across the lake. I therefore thought it would be fun to do again and, moreover, for an entire hour. My reasoning was that we would ease into things, spending the first 52 minutes or so conducting, at a very low rate of speed, a detailed introduction to our assigned area ("This is Buoy #1, here's Buoy #2, and hello, Buoy #75").

This introduction would also involve an examination of underwater maps to check for possible obstructions ("You say a four-inch log was completely submerged at this spot outside the boundary in 1987? Has anyone checked it since then to see if it has migrated into the potential path of a Jet Ski?"). We would also perform a detailed examination of the machine itself, including all maintenance records since its purchase, and scrutinize accident and dismemberment records.

If at the end of this safety check I was assured that we had a good chance of coming out of this experience alive, we would have, oh, 7 or 8 minutes left for actual drive time, which would be conducted at about 8 miles an hour, should we be overtaken by a fit of risk-seeking behavior.

Before taking the Jet Ski out, of course, we had to agree, in writing, that we would not hold the rental place accountable should we happen to become deceased in the process of riding their machine. Nowhere on that release form, however, did it even hint that operating the machine might, under certain circumstances, such as that you are male, result in a personality change so complete as to render you indistinguishable from a madman.

Immediately after leaving the No Wake area, the Jet Ski, with Joe at the helm and me as passenger, began swerving and pitching, speeding across the waves at a rate of speed approaching and overtaking the sound barrier, the light barrier, the space-time barrier, etc., leaving in its wake all my detailed safety examinations. I began to believe that we were being attacked by some large, malevolent marine creature bent on our destruction.

It is a good idea, in these situations, to work out ahead of time some sort of communication method with your partner, so that when you squeeze his midsection so hard his life jacket is in danger of combusting, he does not interpret this to mean you wish him to a) go faster or b) turn harder. Joe was very sensitive to my communication, interpreting any signal I tried to give him as c) go faster AND turn harder, and soon I gave up trying to communicate anything except the wish to my Creator to stay on this earth a while longer. At the end of the ride I saw immediately that we should have taken the optional insurance for surgically removing a passenger's fingers from the driver's waist.

Though Joe expressed disappointment that our personal watercraft did not get airborne enough to qualify as an aircraft -- an observation about which we have some disagreement -- I encouraged him to look on the positive side. At least we were going way too fast for any nature to catch up to us.