To read part fifteen of day six, click here.

I made it about half of the way to the white spot before I gave up. It was getting too difficult.

Trying to get into the white water swim position wasn’t too hard – you had to tuck your feet in and float onto your back. That wasn’t the hard part.

The hard part was trying to swim against the current to get back to the shore. I swam as hard as I could, but I wasn’t making any headway. I was pretty much just staying in the same spot.

I prayed – Lord, please help me to get back to shore. Please. I really don’t want to be the only one who has to get thrown the rope. Please, God.

Slowly but surely, I started gaining ground. I was getting closer to shore. I tentatively put my knee down -we had been told that if you could do a pushup in the water, you could put your feet down. It wasn’t shallow enough yet.

I was still swimming, and still making a little bit of headway. Not a lot, but enough that I was probably going to make it back to shore. I put my knee down to see if it was shallow enough, and my knee touched the bottom.

My other knee touched the rock. I started crawling, glad for something that I could make contact with.

All of a sudden, the rock disappeared. My head went under the water, and the river started pulling me downstream again. I fought to get my head above water again, and took a big gulp of air. I also swallowed half of the river with it.

I coughed and spluttered, but managed to keep my head above water after that. I swam some more, praying that I would make contact again. It was so hard, swimming against the current, and if I didn’t have something to grab soon, I was going to get pulled downstream. I wasn’t strong enough to swim against the current for that long.

Giving up wasn’t an option, but sooner or later I wasn’t going to be making headway, and I was going to be taken downstream.

I yelped as my knee ran into a sharp rock. It took me a couple of seconds to realize what that meant. Rock! Something to grab at! I put my hands down to grab the rock, but it wasn’t there. My knees were on it, but apparently it wasn’t a very big rock. I reached down by my knees and sighed in relief as my hands found something to grab.

While I was taking a mini break there, I looked up and realized that rocks were sticking out of the river a couple of feet ahead of me. A little bit behind them, was solid ground.

A minute or two later, I was pulling myself up onto solid ground.

Pulling myself out of the water after the Rapids Swim Assessment

I looked down at my knee that had hit the rock and wiped the blood off of it. Apparently the rock had been sharp enough to cut me. It wasn’t bleeding any more though, so I forgot it and walked over to where the canoes were.

Katie greeted me. “Great job, Brett! You did it. I knew you could!”

“Thanks, Katie. What are we doing now? Packing up?”

“Nope, now it’s time for the flip and swim.”

I think she said something along the lines of “Don’t worry, you’ll be ok.”, but I didn’t hear her. I just heard “flip and swim” over and over in my head. We had to flip? On purpose??

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.*