So just before my daughter Stephanie turned 24, she announced that she wanted us to go parasailing for her birthday gift. I figured, hey, that could be fun. I had seen pictures of these boats with huge fans blowing air into a huge parachute attached to the front of the boat and moving at a pretty good clip. Although I'm not big on water sports and don't tolerate boats very well, I thought that this might actually be a lot of fun. And besides, if this is what the kid wants for her birthday, I'm there.

Well here are a couple of things I found out about parasailing this weekend:

1. There is no fan on the boat. No huge fan, no small fan, no fan of any sort.

See any fans on this boat?

2. Although there is a parachute, it's not attached to the front of the boat - it's attached to YOU!!! You sit at the back of the boat with this parachute attached to your back and then when the boat takes off, guess what happens to you? You rise. How far up? Well under normal circumstances, 400 feet up. This brings me to the next thing I found out about parasailing.

They put a parachute on YOU! (On this particular day, John Travolta was steering the boat.)

3. Hurricane Dennis is not normal circumstances. The sea was angry that day, my friends. With the wind constantly blowing at about 20 knots and gusts up to 50, the ride was not as smooth as I had been promised. In fact it was absurdly bumpy. The pelting rain added to the pleasantness of the experience.

Getting to meet Dennis.

Screaming as I had never screamed before seemed to help. Of course no one could hear me 400, 600, 1000 feet below. But no amount of screaming made me feel any more confident about that 3/8 inch diameter rope that was the only device preventing me from being blown over to West Virginia. It just did not seem possible to me that that rope could sustain the force of those winds. It's the same kind of bungee cord that always snaps in two on you when you're trying to stretch it over the car top carrier. Only not as thick. And yet, I grasped as tightly as I would had I had complete confidence in it.

Stephanie on her way down...

The captain's fitting me ("The Big Guy" he kept calling me) with a special smaller parachute than Stephanie's (21 foot diameter versus 26 foot) so that I did not catch as much wind raised in my mind the question as to whether it was appropriate for me to be going up like that in the first place.

Stephanie about to touch down.

Nevertheless, we each had our fifteen-minute ride and promised each other we would do it again in 40 years.