Lakes are beautiful. Not only are the large bodies of water spectacular to look at, often lakes are surrounded by beautiful scenery. Trees, rocks, other native foliage. The overall view is usually a spectacular sight, I just don’t want to swim in them. I think most people don’t have a problem with swimming in a lake but my green mossy lake childhood experience was enough to wreck me forever.

One summer years ago, Irene and I took our then two dogs Jerry (half yellow Labrador Retriever – half Golden Retriever), and Brandy (Golden Retriever) camping to Bass Lake. On one of the days we rented a pontoon boat so that we could enjoy the lake from a different perspective. What a wonderful experience that was. The dogs of course loved it. Jerry, being the (always) commander sat in the front of the boat and seemed to me our navigator as if it was his job to make sure we were going in the right direction all the time. Brandy on the other hand always enjoyed living in the lap of luxury and just enjoyed the ride sitting aside Irene on one of the benches. Irene even put her sunglasses on Brandy and she left them on, so we called her the ‘movie star’. Princess she always was.

During our excursion we beached the pontoon on a sandy shore at an exclusive area that looked like a good place for Jerry and Brandy to swim, as they always loved to do. As long as Brandy had her pink knobby squeak ball, all was good. We took that ball everywhere for her!

While relaxing on the shore of the lake and playing with the dogs, we noticed that the pontoon slipped away from it’s tie and was now rather quickly heading into the lake’s open waters. I knew what this meant and my head started to spin already. I now needed to swim in the lake to go retrieve the boat. Although I am a very good swimmer, open bodies of water with green moss or underwater plant life anywhere was enough to send me over the edge.

I felt like I was going into ‘battle’. I’m going in. There was no choice if I didn’t want to lose our boat, I had to go in the water.

I needed to swim as fast as I could to try and catch up to the runaway boat and on my way was a very large area of green moss and underwater plant life of some kind. I could feel it all over. I could feel it on my legs, on my whole body as I just kept swimming to catch the boat. For me, it was horrifying but I kept going. I can’t imagine was my hear rate was at that point but even the memory of that experience makes me cringe.

I was able to finally catch up to the boat and somehow climb aboard. I think I might have even just magically popped out of the water to NOT be in it anymore. At that point, I did’t care about getting scraped up anywhere, I just needed to get OUT of that water and I did!

Looking back a the memory, this story is somewhat humorous to us both, albeit terrifying for me to ‘relive’. I chalked this up as a success story for me, as did Irene because she knows my aversion to green mossy lakes. Regardless of my day’s plight, we had a great time on the lake with one another and with Jerry and Brandy. Memories are nothing to us if there is nothing to remember.