Paul Lemoine

The Event

The Event: By Paul Lemoine January 15th :2021 … NW Australia… The moonlight is just peeking through a gap in the clouds over Tin Can Bay. The light makes a straight line across the water like a silver shimmering road. It’s early January and the hot weather has arrived, even the nights are warm now. Still, there is a calming quiet about the water now, but in twelve hours there will be swimming kids, small sail boats dashing across the waves, and tourist getting sunburns scattered on beach blankets like french-fries on a baking sheet. But right now it’s just Ryan and his golden lab Riley walking out on the dock and enjoying the quiet evening before tomorrow’s invasion. Riley has run ahead as dogs usually do and has started barking at something at the end of the dock. In itself this is not unusual, but this time he seemed to be overly excited about something at the end of the dock. Ryan decides to start running a bit as it dawned on him that Riley might just jump in the bay, and he would have to somehow get him out of the water. As he gets closer he begins to make out through an unusually sudden mist the bow of a small boat still tied to the dock. The back half of the boat was half full of water. He says out loud like Riley could understand, if this boat wasn’t tied to the dock it would be lying on the bottom of the bay right now. As he was looking around the small boat that the fishing gear was still in the boat, and a small cooler, and the live bait tank had bait in it. Ryan began to look around to see if anyone was close by, thinking the owner of the boat may have gotten into some trouble and went to get it help and would be returning soon. Meanwhile he continued scanning the boat to find out why the boat was half full of water and about to sink. After about thirty minutes he came to the conclusion that there was no apparent reason for the condition of the boat, and that no one was returning to the dock. Ryan decided to walk back to the beach area and check the to see if anyone was around that might need some help. Riley and him were about half way back to the beach when a loud kind of splashy boom noise happened. Ryan instinctively ducked his head and turned back to see what was happening, and he quickly realized that he was seeing the half sunk boat and all the gear flying about ten feet over his head and it landed about fifty feet past the dock and crashed down onto the beach. Then, as if that wasn't weird enough, the dock started to shake violently and begins to come apart. Riley had already took off running down the dock toward the beach and looking back and barking as if saying, what the heel are you waiting for, come on. The shaking was getting worse as Ryan took off running and he had just jumped off the end of the dock walkway onto the beach when the whole dock was torn to pieces behind him. His first thought was some kind of earthquake was happening, or something in the boat blew up, or maybe a tidal wave. But then as quickly as the whole strange event started, everything just stopped and became calm and quiet again, like nothing happened at all. Ryan looked up and down the beach and was confused about seeing that nothing else had been affected. No water up on the beach, no waves, the water was strangely calm with just a slight glow around where the pier had been. Riley came running back and sat beside him and just stared out at the bay, when Ryan saw a baseball cap floating at the edge of the water and started walking toward it, Riley suddenly started barking again like he was on the end of the dock earlier, so Ryan thought maybe staying away from the water might be a good idea. He was thinking to himself, it was like the water might be come after him if he got too close. So he decided to stay away from the water and turned around to walk back and take a look at the crashed boat on the beach to see if there was a registration or something that would identify who owned the boat. That seemed like the least dangerous thing to do. Maybe there was something in the pile of boat parts that would help him find out who owned the boat, and report what had happened to the local police in the morning.