Missing the Boat

The story you are about to read is true, the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

My husband has a good friend that works for the same investment firm that he does. We'll call this friend "Fred" in honor of Lucy and Ricky's good friend, Fred Mertz. Anyway, about 2 weeks ago, Fred and his family went on an Alaskan cruise, courtesy of a contest he won through their firm. (The same firm that allowed my hubby and daughter to go to Scotland.) Anyway, they're on the cruise and one of the ports of call is Juneau. In Juneau, Fred decides he wants to go fishing for one of his day trips, since he is such an avid sportsman. He goes fishing with a guy and knows he has to be back at the boat at a certain time. Anyway, the guy that takes him fishing, gets kind of turned around and disoriented in his directions motoring Fred back to the cruise ship and they end up getting lost. Fred realizes he doesn't have long before the ship takes off, so he calls (yes, his mobile phone actually worked!) the firm's travel agent and asks for help. They contact the ship and the captain of the cruise liner tells Fred he basically has three choices. He can:
1. pay $10,000 per minute for the ship to wait on him (no joke),
2. catch a plane and meet up with the ship at the next port of call or
3. catch up with the ship while it is still in the bay and be hoisted up on a rope.

Can you guess which option he took? He did, in fact, catch up with the ship in their little bass boat and was hoisted up on a rope to get back on board. He only had a specific time period in which to do this because the ship was heading out from the docking area and would only be in the inlet a certain amount of time before it reached open waters. As it was, he said that hundreds of people were leaning over the edges of the ship and snapping pictures of him as he was hoisted up. My husband asked Fred recently if he had any pictures and he said he hasn't been able to find anyone that took the pictures. His wife was in the stateroom, pretty upset about what had happened and was not in the mood to snap pictures.

It is reminiscent of a crazy scene from I Love Lucy where Lucy missed the boat that is taking Ricky, Fred and Ethel to Europe. She gets her dress caught on a passing bike while walking on the pier to get on board. So she has to rent a helicopter which takes her out to the ship and delivers her safely on board.

It just goes to show you that the old saying "there is nothing new under the sun", is usually pretty true.