Do canoes count?
The then Mrs. dchurch and I went on holiday to the South of France some years ago. It was a rather fly-by-wire affair, in which we had to meet a bloke in a carpark by a supermarket some 300 miles north of where we were staying at 9pm to get the keys to the place we'd hired. We missed him by a few hours due to getting lost in Paris on the way, but miraculously saw his car when we were just a few KM from the house....it's not quite that simple, but that's for another QoTW.
Once we'd finally got to the place and eventually met up with our friends who were also staying at the same place, we all decided to go and hire some canoes.
We managed to find a large shed with some French blokes who would hire us a canoe each. We asked about lifejackets...they seem perplexed but one of the blokes went away for about 15 minutes and came back with armfuls of jackets, each with about an inch of dust on them. We asked about helmets; similar story. Health and Safety clearly hadn't reached this far south at the time.
The Mrs jumps straight into her canoe with shouts along the lines of "Last one to the rapids gets the first round in when we get back...." and shot off in the direction of some rather fast running water.
We all follow.
As she hit the first of the rapids, she was thrown about like a ragdoll, eventually tossed free of the canoe and was dragged through the rapids until she's black and blue and knocked unconscious.
A friend and I dragged her out, which is no easy feat whilst in a canoe in fast moving water - there would have been little point either of us getting out as well, as we too would have been thrown around and beaten by rocks.
The speed of the water is still dragging us along for quite some time, but now with an unconscious girl sprawled across two canoes. Eventually we came to a clearing.
We rescued her canoe, which had been following us due to the water flow, and tied the three canoes together with our shoelaces. It was clear that we weren't going back *up* the river for help and had to continue onwards until we found a road or simply just other people - so far we'd seen nothing but dirty and fast moving water. We could just as easily have been in the Amazon or Chattooga. Indeed, I half expected to see Burt Reynolds brandishing a crossbow.
Another of our group had been thrown free of his canoe in one of the subsiquent rapids, and was dragged through some rather fierce looking trees...until the branches had ripped his shorts off and he'd managed to drag himself to the side.
We had to negotiate ever more violent rapids tied together in this manner for the next fifteen km until we finally ended up in some French MOD land. After some time waiting we'd managed to flag down an army vehicle.
Unfortunately, at the time, the only one of us who spoke French to a degree higher than a toddler was the chap who was now walking about in nothing but trainers and a filthy looking lifejacket.
So, in the middle of some MOD land in searing heat, with a now semi-unconcious girl laying back in a canoe tethered to two others we see a bright yellow bloke flying his English flag - thankfully flying it low - flagging down a French military vehicle and attempting to ask to be taken to a phone (I'm not sure I could have got the word 'flag' in there any more times).
Instead, they went away and bought back a medic. A medic with some rather bizarre methods of treatment. Some sugar tablets, and some very odd massaging of all of Mrs.D's bits until she fully comes round, albeit with a stonking headache.
The medic(s) then picked her up and took her off somewhere informing us that we'd have to carry on for ANOTHER 15km before we'd be anywhere where they could get a vehicle to to be able to pick up the canoes. I wasn't all that happy about letting Mrs.D be taken off in that way, but they insisted that she go alone...and to be honest, there was very little I could do about it, seeing as they had guns, and I barely had my dignity.
In all though, they very kindly had driven her back to the house along with a medic to look after her some hours later after treatment...although, to this day she, understanderbly refuses to go near any kind of floatation device.

tl;dr

Hired canoes, girl got mashed against rocks, man loses shorts, flags down Jeep, French military save the day.
(dchurch bah, Mon 5 Nov 2012, 10:41, Reply)