Article July 30, 2001 Issue

When you're drifting out to sea?

Between the wind and the complete exhaustion, I couldn't do anything.

By Katie Martin

I like to windsurf a lot. Out in front of our home in Newburyport, Massachusetts, there is a small tidal basin that flows into the Merrimack River, which empties into the Atlantic Ocean. The basin is where we do most of our windsurfing.

Several years ago, in November, three of us wanted to go surfing—the last trip of the season. I was with two neighbors, both men, and we decided that we were going to go out of the basin on our windsurfers, go around a small island called Wood-bridge Island, and then come back.

We headed out and were having great fun. I was following my friends, but keeping up. We headed out around the island, and suddenly—it seemed out of nowhere—the skies darkened, it started to rain a little bit, and it got very windy. We began to just fly over the water. We were actually having a lot of fun, but we thought we were going to have to head back pretty soon because we didn't know what was going to happen with the weather. We had also been out there for nearly two hours. As we headed back, being last in line, I noticed that instead of heading back into the basin, my friends were in fact going to cross the deep, fast-moving part of the Merrimack River and sail over to the other side, where there was a nice sandy beach.

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