where, oh where has my li'l dingy gone?

where has my lil dingy gone

Oh where oh where could it be?

ok so we have just realized that 14 minutes worth of macrame has gone to the dogs. back up come the binoculars to capture the essence of Brian's cunundrum sinking in to his fuzzy head.

It wasn't long before he came ambling down the dock, a bounce in his step and his tank top flailing away. When he got to the place where the dingy had been a huge, nervous smile spread across his melon. This was better than candid camera!

Brian casually looked from one end of the dock to another, hoping that his extremely fragile reality was not finally beginning to crumble. he peered over to us but we were concealed beneath the bimini and completely out of earshot anyway, so there was nothing we could do - except roll around the deck in fits of hilarity.

Brian actually worked pretty good in a crisis situation. He walked out to the fuel pumps at the end of the dock and asked if they had seen the dingy (i can only suppose, we actually have no idea what the conversation was). we were waiting for him to call over on the radio but i think he was too embarrassed (or too intimidated by the electronics involved) to contact us.

he stayed in the fuel hut for quite a while. eventually he was escorted down the dock by a west indian in a red t-shirt. The red t-shirt kept making motions with his hand s which conveyed "i have no idea where it is. No, i haven't seen anyone leaving the island in a dingy with a greeeeen moata!"

then the red t-shirt pointed across the bay to the dingy's new position. "is thaat ya booat, mon?" his fingers asked.

brian looked and turned back to the red t-shirt. "How could that be my boat? I'm ... I'm sure that....I mean... I know i didn't park it there. I guess it could be my boat but i ... i tyed that thing up over here" he must have said.

after more armwaiving by red and more rocking by brian he finally walked along the beach in front of pusser's to the other dock. he inspected the dingy, not wanting to be locked in a third world jail for pilfering a boat which wasn't his.

after deciding that "well it looks like our dingy... i mean it has that SeaBreeze on the side there and that ... i think i recall that was the name of the company we rented the boat from.... or was it caribbean travel network? i seem to remember that when i was trying to get a train ticket to the caribbean that chesty gave me a number to a woman... i think i remember her name was rena.... i wonder what she looked like?... let's see caribbean travel network was the place we got the tickets... yeah, ok then i guess SeaBreeze was the company we got that boat from.

well, lets see... it has got the green motor and i remember i cranked it up and that motor was green....."

he looked around and noone was chasing after him so he must have assumed it was our boat.

now how would he let the rope go and crank the motor without drifting out to sea?

he did return and later that evening we found out that the young sailor tying the dingy up earlier was in fact roe's brother pete. - he had seen brian come to the dock and thought it would be a neat trick. he and will had watched from the deck of pusser's with the entire restaurant and been laughing just as hard as we were.

guilt finally forced me to tell brian the truth, 3 days after we returned home.