It is early in the morning on Wednesday September 21st and I am getting ready to go pick up the boat for the race. We will race our boats across Thomas Park pond for physics. My group had worked long and hard on this boat and had it all painted up and ready to win. Our group name is PBnJ, for Patrick, Branden, Nathan, and Jando. We decided to cover our boat in Happy Birthday decorations to suck up since it was Mrs. Gatz's birthday.
Our group lined up our boat and Branden climbed in followed closely behind me. We lined up, we got the go sign, and got a giant push from Patrick and Jando. Off we went across the pond. To be honest my first reaction was, "Oh my God, we are actually floating and going somewhere." I completely thought we weren't going to go anywhere and that we would just sink down into the cold water and goose poop. We are now about half way across and now the wind is taking us off course so I switch my paddle to my other hand then we started to lose ground. I switched back and now the other group ahead of us is now stuck in the mud only feet from the edge. My arm is getting sore and it is scraping against the top of our cardboard walls. The other group has touched the edge and now we are going for second and get there a short 7 seconds later.
With our second place finish we were guarunteed an A minus so we were pretty happy, and we ended up getting our picture on the front page of the paper.
You definitely have all the details here. And I love your boat name--very clever. I think this piece could really come alive, though, if you start in the water, drawing out each of your sentences so that it reads less like a list and more like an action scene. You're close to this when you're giving us the play-by-play, but even then, I'd like to see you use more of your senses, so that we can see the crowd looks like, what the other boat looks like, what else the water feels like (besides cold), what your teammates are doing, etc. These kinds of descriptions would make for a longer entry, of course, but they would also bring us closer to your sense of humor, I think.
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