- Sep 4, 2014
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The last time I went to the Pensacola beach airshow was in 1995. Rather than try to drive out there and somehow find a place to park, instead we put my little 15' Hydrostream Viper in the water, and drove out the inlet into the surf with 1000 other boats. It was awesome, until it wasn't.
In the morning the water was great. Nice and smooth for my little boat, plus we rode in the wake of some pretty big pleasure craft on the way out. Easy peezy.
Watching the show from the boat was very cool. Then when the show was over, rather than head back in with all the other boats, we left it at anchor and swam in through the surf to party at The Dock, which is right across the main road from Flounder's. After having one too many, we stumbled back out to the surf and swam to the boat and managed to drag ourselves back aboard. That's when the fun began.
The nice calm water we drove out in was long gone. The friggin waves were taller than the damn boat. I was going so slow back to the marina that I was barely making steerage, and every 5 seconds was another back-breaking crash as we tumbled from the crest of one wave down into the following trough like a sack of wet cement. I damn near abandoned ship simply out of fear that one or both of us were going to sustain a serious injury. And this wasn't a ten minute ride either, it was like 10 miles just to the inlet, then another 8 miles or so to the marina north of the base. The whole journey was like a 2 hour long plane crash.
At least it was dark by the time we got to the ramp, and nothing about my setup was appropriate for night running. Good times! Well anyway, we lived to tell about it...but never again.
The last time I was in Pensacola was for a girlfriend family member’s graduation. I ended up doing shots from an Asian girl’s a** on the beach with a current FL politician.
Anyway, I didn’t see any airplanes.