Do you have any stories from your life that seem to have a full epic plot, and would you like to share them, please?

No.

Every story has a beginning a middle and an end.

I’m still in the middle of my story.

It’s been pretty epic so far. lol

The latest chapter has me spending money wantonly because I can, after that it’s cat food and day old bread. hahahaha

Yes, but I’m saving it for a book.

We were on a kayak trip in Baja, camping on the beach. The weather was beautiful, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The beach was sort of horseshoe shaped and there was an island that we would kayak to every day to have lunch and do some snorkeling. This day started no differently than the rest. A group of 5 of us went out to the island for a leisurely morning paddle. We beached the kayaks and climbed around the small island, which wasn’t bigger than a large house.

We caught some crabs and stuck them in the holds of two of the kayaks, with the intent of cooking them up for dinner. They weren’t big, but they’d add to a nice chowder we were making with some fresh caught clams. We hung out to just after noon, and then the weather started to change so we decided to head back to shore.

The wind started picking up very quickly and got stronger and stronger, and it blew directly off shore. 4 of us were strong paddlers, and there was one newby. We had 4 kayaks, one double and 3 singles. We tied the newby up to the double and they made it back to shore, but two of us in the other singles got caught in the wind.

The wind blew stronger and stronger. Never before had I experienced such a force. We were trying to kayak against a 60 mile per hour wind directly in our faces. It was all we could do to stay in one place, let alone go forward. We tried to go sideways but every time we tried we got swamped by the waves.

We couldn’t speak it was so loud. We tried to yell but our voices were lost in the howl. I motioned that we should go back to the island and my mate agreed. We made it back to the island, mostly because the wind was at our back, but we almost got swept into the deep of the Gulf. As we beached the kayaks, one of them was picked up by the wind and was blown end over end across the beach. My friend, alert, dove and caught it, cutting his elbow in the dive. We looked back to the beach, but couldn’t see anything. Where the beach was was just a wall of sand.

Seeing the kayaks weren’t safe, we dragged them over a mound to be somewhat protected. Then we sat and waited.

The wind didn’t stop.

For hours we waited. The sun went low, and finally set. I said, “At least it’s not raining.” And then it rained.

We were cold. I had a wetsuit top on, but he had just a bathing suit. I surrounded him in floats, and everything I could find, but he was still cold. Finally, I got in the back of the kayak and put him in a hug to keep him warm. We sat that way for hours.

We both managed to doze off for an hour or two and about 2 in the morning the storm finally stopped. We briefly discussed kayaking back to shore but we also realized that that would be insanely stupid, since dawn was just a few hours away. We were in Baja—we weren’t going to freeze to death. We had a little water, and we weren’t going to starve.

But about 4 in the morning we heard a scritch scritch scritch in the predawn stillness. Puzzled, we couldn’t figure it out, until we realized that it was the crabs we caught. It was then that I realized that our whole ordeal was a punishment from the Crab God.

After dawn broke, we heard a motor boat, and one of the local fisherman had come out to get us. It turns out that the beach was turned into a maelstrom of sand, and was uninhabitable, so while we were stuck on the island, everybody else had gotten a hotel room and got drunk on margaritas. Only the one newby was upset—even my wife was saying, “Relax! They’ll be fine!’

The trip organizer tried to get a rescue boat out during the storm, but the Mexican Coast Guard just laughed at him. “They’re hombres. They’ll survive the night.” But the did hire a boat to get us the next morning. We could have paddled back, but it was nice to get a ride.

@Rarebear

Wow, quite a chapter. lol

My only experiences in Mexico involved extreme hedonism and little adventure.

Trace cervezas, nueve carne asada tacos. lol

@Coloma We had plenty of those too.

@Rarebear thanks for living to tell the tale.

I was involved in a kidnapping (I was the kid) was taken to Panama, my mother then had to rescue me…my kidnapper had political pull there and my mother had family there (her mother and sister worked in the Canal Zone) The kidnappers had drugs planted in my aunts house there and the police were called in to arrest her to keep her out of “the scene”. My mother was in the US during all this while trying to get exact information on where I was in the country, as soon as she found out an exact location a friend of hers who was a pilot flew her secretly into the country and with the help of some family members there was able to get me back (too many detail in between) She got a hold of the US embassy and state dept. and was given permission as well as help getting us out of the counrty and back to the US. Overall the ordeal lasted about a year. A true tale of espionage lol…I don’t remember any of this I was about 2 years old and this was in 1977…......I have many other stories too but just waiting some before I write a book about my fantastic adventures. (I did not have your typical family)

I have to tell you, a lot of my life stories are pretty epic – so people say anyway when they hear them…this one time, in London, a friend of mine was visiting and this other friend of mine ( I was his RA) got together with her into my tiny (tiny!) shower, bent her over and put his entire arm (not a small guy) into her butt as I sat across from them on the toilet smoking a cigarette and drinking Sex on the Beach…they had so much fun, they flooded my room and during the clean-up both my mom and fiancee were calling to check in and that was all pretty awkward. And unforgettable.

I wonder if what makes a story epic is the storyteller themselves. My maternal grandfather has always been able to make an engaging epic drama out of something as simple as going to the grocery store. Until recent years, he could hold the attention of an entire room of people by telling some “amazing” tale—and then when you thought about it, not much actually happened in the story—it was just the way he told it.

My paternal grandmother has the amazing ability to take her amazingly epic life and make it outrageously boring. She lived in Germany during WW2 and had some events happen in her life that would make amazing stories—like she was an interpreter for war crime trials that took place in Dachau after the war for starters. That alone should give her weeks worth of amazing tales to tell. However, she can actually bore you to death talking about her amazing life.