James Laird - "Camping at Lark Ellen Home for Boys" - Page 3

I was an expert swimmer and I figured l could swim to the first float and back. The water was crystal clear at the end of the pier and hard to tell how deep it was. I asked the instructor how deep the water was off the end of the pier and he looked and said about four feet which is what it looked like to me so I stepped off and went down well over my head and came up sputtering and splashing around trying to find which way the float was. Someone on the pier threw a life ring and hit me in the head which did not help, and the instructor jumped in to save me, getting his summer uniform all wet. The tide was in and the deep water surprised us both. They classified me a sinker which turned out OK as I was the first to graduate to beginner and earn points for our tent.

Our hikes around the island were a favorite of mine. We were instructed in the names of the various plants and rocks we passed, as well as what we found along the beaches and tide pools. On one hike we came across a camper sleeping on the beach. He had sailed his boat across from Newport Beach and had anchored it out a short way from the beach. He said it was a Snipe, and had planned to spend a week sailing around this side of the island exploring all the small inlets like the one he was camped at before sailing home.

The campfire each night were always great fun. We sang a few songs as the flames reached for the stars, and when the flames died down one of the councilors would tell us a story about some of his travels across Europe by bike. It usually had a haunted castle in it somewhere that would have kept us wide awake for hours if we had not been so tired from all the day's activities.

Jim Laird