YOU SUNK MY BATTLESHIP

so last weekend some friends and i went about two hours south and went 4-wheeling. we had two atv's (pretty nice one's i might add). from this trip i realized two things. first, i am getting one...eventually. second, it will have a 100-foot tow rope.

allow me to ellaborate on the tow rope (i assume the first point is selfexplanitory). you see, we almost lost an atv that day. no joke.

moydie was driving an atv with a girl who had never been on one before. just prior to their leaving i pointed out a really cool ridge by a dam to moydie. so naturally he wanted to go see. so off they went and on the other side of the dam they found a dried up resevoir. there was no visible water anywhere. so moydie started to cross the patch of mud where the water had once been. the mud patch was about 100 feet in diameter. about half way, moydie thought that he might be going too fast for the first-timer girl. so he slowed down. and sank. to the fenders.

luckily, i was also giving a girl a ride nearby and we drove past them as they were walking back to the cars. they had mud up to their knees and no atv in sight. moydie asks me, "does that atv have a tow rope?" it didnt. they told us what had happened and we went back to the scene. as we came over the dam, there it was. smack-dab in the middle of a 100 foot mud puddle. impressive to say the least.

so i drive around the mud a bit to see how close i can get with out sinking the other atv. after nearly losing my shoes, and ruining my pants i determine that we cant get my atv close enough for the tow rope on the stuck atv. this has to be the thickest mud i have ever seen. the top was a rock hard shell about 8 inches thick, below which was about the thickest, most grimy mud you can imagine for about 2 feet. so we go back to the cars and collect all of the rope and tie down cables and bungie cords we can find. it is just barely long enough to link the atv's together. so i rev up the atv and go and go and rev it some more and SNAP! we almost get cut in half by the tie down cables which have ripped in half and shot in opposite directions. i cant say i was surprised, but it was worth a shot.

our next attempt was to rummage through our fire wood and see if we could find some 2x4's long enough to shove under the back tires. we did. we had to take some nails out but they were long enough. unfortunately, the mud was too silky for the tires to get any traction at all (by the way, it required crawling on hands and knees to get to the atv without sinking two feet). so moydie decided to go back to his dad's house (30 minutes away) and see what they could come up with. we werent disappointed.

they came back with shovel, plywood, a few lengths of some very heavy chain, and a 100-foot cable twice the thickness of the tow rope. so moydie and his dad crawl out to the atv and we toss them the shovels and the plywood. we attach the cables and chains together and i rev up the other atv. the only problem now is that the atv is so stuck that my front end comes up and almost flips the atv on top of me. so we get everyone who isnt in the middle of the mud puddle and put them on my atv. that was enough weight to keep my atv on the ground and get the other atv out of the mud.

what a day.