Sailing in the Bahamas

So while on our honeymoon, Autumn and I found out we are not even close to being sailors. We were sitting on the beach one day watching all these couples jump on catamarans and take them out in the ocean. They'd zip around with ease and come back smoothly into shore, smiling and laughing. We had taken a ride with one of the activities instructors earlier in the week and it looked super easy. We started talking about how fun it would be to take one out ourselves so we went up to the activities desk.
"Do you guys know how to sail?"
"Oh yeah! We took the lesson and we got this! Super easy"

Turns out Sandals isn't very strict about who they let sail....

So Autumn and I go down to the water and tow our boat off the beach. All smiles!

And we're off! With the wind at our back and full of confidence we go zipping off the shore a hundred miles an hour straight out into the ocean. We're laughing and saying how easy it is and we should get one of these for the lake in Montana on the 4th of July! This is awesome!

Well we start getting pretty far off shore and I decide to turn the boat to start heading back in. I turn the rudder like the guy showed us and all of a sudden the sail comes whipping across the boat and about takes both our heads off. The boat tips all the way to one side and about dumps us in the water so we both leaned hard and it came back down with a thud. We both laughed thinking this was pretty funny and a good story to tell later but then we realized the boat wasn't moving.  No big deal right? We're pros. I got this....

Turns out going back into shore is MUCH harder than going out. We had zipped out in about 3 minutes. Well it took us about 40 minutes and a rainstorm to et the boat back to shore. Those laughs and thoughts about getting a sailboat went out the window as fast as they came up. We finally got the boat into shallow enough water that I could just jump out and pull the boat in. Once we finally dragged our boat onshore, everyone was either laughing at us, concerned that we weren't going to make it back, or taking pictures.

That was the last time we went near a sailboat.