To read part eleven of day six, click here.

I was petrified. I was sure that Bruce and I weren’t going to be able to make one of those turns and we would flip.

One of the instructors went, and made it safely through. One of our crewmates in their canoe went, and flipped. Another one of our crewmates canoes went, and they flipped. After that, it was our turn.

At first I had thought, ok, don’t paddle to much. I figured that if we were going slower, it would be easier to make the turns. We got in the rapids and I needed to paddle to keep us going the way we needed to go. So I was moving us forward, and Bruce was trying to turn us the way we needed to go. It wasn’t really working.

I threw in a couple of correction strokes before going back to paddling. I was surprised to see that we actually made the first turn! But then we had to turn to the left, and we were this close to not making it. But Bruce was able to turn us that time, and I didn’t even have to use a correctional stroke!

So we had made two of the turns. But we still had to make another turn, and we had to go over the big hole.

All I could do was pray, paddle, and pray some more, with an occasional correctional stroke thrown in here and there.

We passed in between the two rocks. I did some big correctional strokes, praying that combined with whatever Bruce was doing, it would be enough to get us over the hole.

The hole was right in front of us. It was massive! It was probably two or three feet deep, and right on the other side of it was a big white foamy spot that was about two or three feet above the surface of the water. I panicked, paddling frantically.

The tip of our canoe went down, and I knew we were going to flip. My paddle was connecting with nothing but air – all I could see was the final rapids of the day, the one that was going to make us flip. Bruce and I hadn’t flipped yet. We were the only canoe to make it that far without flipping, other than the instructors.

I still don’t know what happened there. All I know is that a few seconds after I knew we were going to flip, we were going straight through the big, churning white spot. And when I say through, I mean through. We had over four inches of water in our canoe. But you know what? Our canoe was still upright, so it could hold over four inches of water.

We floated downstream for a couple of seconds before turning abruptly to pull our canoe up on the bank where everyone who had gone before us was waiting. Once we were there we had the fun job of flipping our canoe to empty out the water, and getting it back up again.

When we were done, we got to watch as every other canoe flipped going over that hole.

Click here to read the next part of Day Six.

*Everything here is from my own memory and may not be correct. Outward Bound is not responsible for anything I post here. Thanks too NCOBS for letting me use their photos.*