To read part fourteen of day six, click here.

Kayce and I headed into the water. I think Patrick could tell how scared I was, because he took some extra time to reassure me. I appreciated the gesture, but it didn’t help. Nothing could help with that fear I had. I don’t even know how that fear started. But I had this horrible fear of the water, and nothing anyone did could help.

Which, looking back, is kind of funny. Because I’m not scared of swimming pools, I’m not scared of the ocean, I’m not scared of creeks.

Now, I am scared of the things in those bodies of water. In swimming pools, I’m scared of my brothers who like to sneak up behind me and poke/pinch me. In the ocean, I get freaked out whenever anything brushes my leg, or the fish start jumping out of the water right in front of me. And in creeks, I’m scared of the crayfish.

But with the river, I didn’t even know what I was scared of. Since I’ve had time to think about it, I think it might have been the rocks/rapids. For example, canoeing on the lake hadn’t been a problem. I had been just fine. I had been a little worried about it, but not the irrational fear that I felt about the river!

Patrick told me that I didn’t have to swim so close to the white spot as the others did. He told me to just swim until the current was too strong for me.

I nodded my head, not trusting my voice. Patrick told me to go and I pushed off from the bottom. I thought “This is it. You can do this, Brett. Everyone told you that you would be ok. You can do this. Keep swimming.“

Swimming against the current was hard. We were told not to let our feet hit the bottom, because that was how you could get stuck and hurt your ankle. And with a bad ankle already, I didn’t want to chance that.

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.*