A MARINE ADVENTURE.

Akaroa Mail and Banks Peninsula Advertiser, Volume I, Issue 83, 4 May 1877, Page 3

A MARINE ADVENTURE.

A rather amusing incident which might, however, have been attended with very serious consequences, took place on Saturday afternoon in connection with an acquatic excursion indulged in by two well known citizens, both, we believe, in the share-broking and commission business, who entrusted themselves for the occasion to a small boat and the tender mercies of a youthful scion of the nautical profession—rather addicted to practical jokes. The party started from St. Leonard's, and well victualled both as to liquids and solids, after a somewhat lengthened cruise reached the sandbank in the middle of the harbour at dead low water, when it is dry enough to admit of perambulating in the search for oysters and cockles. Having refreshed the inner man, our fellow-citizen, whom we will call X, set off for a stroll over the banks, leaving his companions enjoying a comfortable smoke in the boat, with the understanding that they were to keep him in sight, and follow him for re-embarkation so soon as the tide began to rise. X, happy in blind faith, wandered on, filling the bags he had with cockles, and soon found the sand yielding more and more under his feet—the tide was rising fast; it was also getting dusk ; he could just see the boat in the distance, and as it did not appear to be moving towards him, he set up a series of unintelligible yells, intended for cooeys, which were heard, it appears, on both sides of the harbour, but were naturally ascribed to excited seagulls. The water rose higher and higher, and the yells of poor X reverberated over the water. Now what had been going on in the boat ? The occupants had both fallen to sleep over their pipes, at least one certainly had. There are doubts as to the young imp of the sea ; but when the former woke up suddenly the latter was, or pretended to be, sound asleep. Where was X? They looked round in every direction. Tide making fast —no signs of him. Sea-imp suggested he might have walked home, but as this implied the crossing a channel some fifteen feet deep and half a mile wide, it was rejected as unlikely. Now shouts from shore attracted their attention, they skirted along the edge of the bank, eventually sighting the head of X, just (and that was all) above water. How he was got into the boat, and the language he used on the occasion, there is no need to describe, but he has given his family to understand that this is his last water excursion for the season—Dunedin Star.