September 17-18, 2005
The Happy's Too had not been on the water in almost two years, so we
headed to Canyon Lake for some afternoon/evening sailing. 
Of
course, what's night sailing if you don't put a former Air Force guy at the
helm? 
And,
more importantly, what is night sailing without acoustic music and beer! 
The
sailing was so good that we decided to drop anchor for the night rather than
loading the boat on the trailer before hitting the rack. It took a couple of
tries, but we got a good set on the anchor. We ate dinner, sat around the
fire, sampled extremely warm Bombay Sapphire gin (Ron??? Why did you even
HAVE that?)... and the wind did not move the boat. So, we
turned in for the night. In the morning, Bob and Mike waded out to the boat
to sail it over to the boat ramp. Tim was on trailer duty -- he was going to
drive the trailer over to the ramp, where Bob and Mike would pick him up for
a quick jaunt into the lake before loading up and heading back to town. The
Glitch: the anchor was set all right. Set so well that Bob couldn't pull it
up. Rather than having Bob or Mike jump in and try to dislodge the anchor --
and then have to get back on a drifting boat in moderate winds -- Tim
offered to swim out and try to get it free. The Smart Thought
Tim DID Have: "If I'm going to swim, I should take my Tevas off." The
Smart Thought that Tim Did NOT Have: "There's a substantially different
coefficient of friction between slick rocks and my Tevas than there is
between slick rocks and my bare feet." (okay, so this might not have
been a particularly smart thought -- I'm pretty sure I'm misusing the term
"coefficient of friction", but mechanical physics is...holy
crap...over fifteen years in my past, and I probably only knew the proper
definition of the term for about 30 seconds even then!). The
Result: One step into the water and Tim was flying through the air as
gracefully as a three-legged pig jumping off of a 5 meter board.
He...um...stuck his right arm out to break his fall. It turned out, the palm
of his hand was just as effective at gripping a slick rock as his bare heel
was. So we quickly had... 
See
that divot below the end of the collarbone? Take a look at your own
shoulder. That divot's not supposed to be there. Dislocation. Fun stuff. We
called a few people who we knew had a history of dislocated shoulders to see
if anyone could tell us over the phone how to put it back in. No dice -- we
were all a little nervous that we'd do more damage in the process, so
weren't too aggressive. Mike headed over to the other campers
at the campground to see if any of them had useful experience. No luck
there, either. So, off we headed to... 
X-rays
there showed the before and after (the one on the right is the dislocated
one -- you can see a big gap between the end of the collarbone and the end
of the arm). 
The
upshot is that Tim wound up with his arm in a sling for about three weeks,
followed by several months of physical therapy. The boat got loaded up and
returned to storage. Tim and Mike missed Benton's 1:00 baseball game, but
Bob made it to Jack's 4:00 game just as it started. Good
times.
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