Listen to the audio file and read the text at the same time. After reading the story give it a short and dramatic title.
Our first fishing trip of the summer was a memorable affair. My brother Peter and I got up at dawn and packed our fishing equipment. The sun was shining, and the sea was calm when we climbed into the little motorboat tied to the quayside. We knew we wouldn’t be able to come back again until the evening high tide, so we had prepared a picnic and taken some bottles of drink.
As soon as we reached the point, we stopped the engine and got out our fishing lines. We were beginning to get bored, so we decided to move further out to sea. That was when things started to go wrong. As we were getting the lines ready again, Peter stood on a fishing hook and got it stuck in his foot. When he sat down with a bump, the boat started to rock violently, and the picnic basket fell overboard. Peter asked me to get the hook out of his foot, so I fiddled with it in vain until he cried out to me to stop because of the pain. Poor Peter was very shaken, and he lay on the bottom of the boat until he felt better.
We didn’t feel much like fishing anymore, so we decided to head back to the beach. I started the engine, and we chugged sadly homewards. We had run out of petrol. Peter opened the storage chest to get out the spare petrol can we always take with us. He looked puzzled for a moment, then he looked alarmed. The can wasn’t there, and he didn’t remember putting it on the boat. We had no choice but to row back, and that would take us hours.
While we were discussing where to head for, we realised, to our horror, that the wind was blowing, and the sea was getting quite rough. We felt really worried when we discovered that the life jackets weren’t on the boat neither. We rowed towards the nearest beach, but after about twenty minutes we didn’t seem to be getting any closer.
Just as we were getting frightened, a fishing boat appeared round the point. For a few moments I thought the boat was going to pass us, so we stood up and shouted. The people on the boat saw us, and as soon as it was close enough, the fisherman threw us a rope and towed us back to the harbour. We were so relieved that we just sat back and enjoyed the ride.
Exercise 1
Find the most appropriate place for these four sentences in the story:
- The tide was going out as we chugged out of the harbour.
- We sat there for nearly an hour, but we didn’t get so much as a single pull on the lines.
- In the end I gave it a violent pull and it came out.
- Suddenly, after about fifteen minutes, the engine stopped.
Exercise 2
Tell me how the writer and her brother felt at these times during their trip:
- When they had been fishing for nearly an hour.
- When the writer had pulled the hook out of Peter’s foot.
- When they started to chug towards home.
- When Peter couldn’t find the spare petrol can.
- When they discovered that the life jackets weren’t on the boat.
- When a fishing boat appeared round the point.
