Caught!
Today was the great day, I and my friends has spent the last three weeks building a raft, it had oil drum floats and the deck was planks of different lengths. We launched the Bootle, as it was called, on the river Tees meaning to stay within just a few yard from the shore.
I was on the raft with another boy and we had an oar each, which we had sort of ‘found’ in a boat. Unfortunately the oars were old and one snapped as it hit the water and the other hit a rock and snapped so now we were without any visible means of steering, and a strong current had caught us.
Our friends on the shore saw what had happened and started running round in circles looking for a stick or a rope and when someone did find a rope, it was too short to reach us and so we were pulled by the current away from our friends.
We tried paddling with our hands but that didn’t work because the current was too strong. Suddenly to our dismay a power boat came skimming across the water straight for us and the driver didn’t see us until the last second when he just managed to swamp us instead of smashing our raft. He could have stopped and helped us but he went on down the river, flying over the water.
After that we caught on a sandbank near the mouth of the river and it must have been knocking-off time because no one was about. Suddenly we saw our friends coming towards us in a rowing boat, they threw us a line and started pulling us towards the shore and when they reached the shore, they jumped out and pulled us in and when we touched the shore the first thing I said was “I’m glad that’s over.”
Teacher’s Comments
B-
Basically a good story idea, but too many events mentioned briefly instead of developing one or two.
Not to mention the run on sentences, repeated words in the same sentence…
(c) M. Robert Gibson
First written 1975-09-04
School exercise.
Don’t forget, it was written by a schoolboy.
It is published here for purely selfish vanity reasons.
M. Robert Gibson 