A close friend of mine and I took a vacation to England, just to see a new part of the world. We flew from Newport News, Virginia. We were originally from the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The plane ride was going to take about nine hours.



After about the first five hours, I noticed that my friend was sleeping. I decided to do the same. The next thing I knew the plane crashed in a swamp land somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

My friend and I were the only two survivors. How we managed to get out of the plane alive, we’ll never know. We both were very confused. We knew that the plane had food and water on it somewhere.

With part of the plane blown up and burned, I knew it probably wouldn’t do any good to look for it. So after a while of debating we decided to go on the plane and see what we could find. The only thing we found was a pocket knife in one of the pilot’s pockets. The first thing we knew we had to do, before we ran out of daylight, was to make shelter with the leaves and the branches. We used part of the plane for support.

We stayed by the plane that night to see if a rescue crew would be on the lookout. The next morning arrived with no sign of rescue. We knew that we could be stranded for a very long time. So it was time for me to remember everything I had seen on the TV show, Man vs.Wild. We were up against exactly what the trained professionals were on the show. We didn’t have a plan yet, so we just stayed put for one more night.

While I was up all day and night thinking about how to keep us alive, I made bow and arrows with the pocket knife. Using the fire we made earlier for light, I made sure that I wasn’t going to cut myself. I gathered two or three foot long sticks and a fishing net I found earlier. The fishing net would be the pull back and release part of the bow and arrow. To keep the sticks in place, I tied leaves around the end of each stick. The first one was so bad I had to make ten more to get the hang of it. Finally the last four that I made we could actually use. After a while I stopped to get some sleep, because the next day was going to be very long and tiring!!

We got up with the sun rising off in the distance and started walking south, either until we were rescued or until we found food and water. We grabbed a bag off the plane in case we could use it for support on our next shelter. We hoped we could put the bow and arrows in the bag, so that we would not get tired of carrying them. Who knew that the bag would turn out to be a life saver!

After a couple of miles we saw three squirrels off in the distance. We knew that we had to make a plan to kill them, because they were the best thing on the menu. We couldn’t think of how to capture all three of the animals. So before they got away, we set the bag down on a little island and grabbed the bow and arrows. We decided to sneak up on them from opposite sides and ambush the squirrels. I was going to make sure that the squirrels were what we were going to have for our dinner!!

We ended up just getting two of the squirrels, but that was okay. We didn’t have to argue about who got more to eat. So we walked back to the bag that we had set on the little island and put the bow and arrows and our dinner in the bag. In the bag we got off the plane, we found a little plastic bucket, a bag of raisins, along with saran wrap. Finally, it hit me. I said, “I know how to make water that we can drink.”

My friend John said, “Thank God. How?” I told him to just put the raisins in the bucket with a little bit of water and put the saran wrap on tightly. Then I told him to walk with the saran wrap facing the sun. The sun would help kill the chemicals in the water, and the raisins would help clean the water. By doing this the raisins would make more water by using the heat from the saran wrap.

“Then I remembered that’s not how you do it”. John said “dude you’ve got to be kidding me,” I said “shut up if you want water I just accidentally told you how to do it backwards,” “Now take the water out of the bucket and put new raisins in and ad new saran wrap and put water on top of the saran wrap” So that the sun will make the water drip from the top in to the bottom of the bucket and the sun will kill the bacteria that is in the water. Allowing the raisins to melt and provide more water. I heard John say “genius,” “I told him nope science”. “Now wile you carry the bucket, I will carry the bag.”

After walking a couple of miles, we found dry land that stretched for who knows how long but there was just one problem, there is a long boa constrictor laying in our path and it looked like the more we moved left the deeper the water the more we moved right the deeper the water.


John said, “so we just have to take a chance and risking our lives and go forward, Oh well we are probably going to die of starvation or dehydration any way,” I said “no just stay close behind me and do exactly as I do”. I had decided to swim under water to the left diagonally and get to the dry land that way because if we had swam to the right diagonally. We would have crossed its path and that would have meant taking a chance of making it come after us we finally, got around the beast to the dry land.

But we were not close to the woods so we couldn’t make shelter so we just kept walking. After about three hours we found a banded ship that looked like it had been sitting therefore year’s maybe even decades. But I didn’t want to take a chance of getting hurt by going on the ship because of how old it was. So we just walked around it. After another three hours or so we found enough leaves and branches to make shelter, and to cook our diner over a fire. Night arrived not long after we had made our shelter and ate our diner. So eventually we fell asleep.


The next morning arrived and it felt like the tempater was ninety five. We grabbed our belongings and went on our next hike, about five hours of walking we took a break.

When we decided to get up and start walking again. John was dehydrated so badly to the point that he couldn’t move. I had to carry him on my back for eight and a half hours. After the long tiring hours of carrying John on my back, I had finally found a long road it looked like we were saved, but there was no one to be found. “The best idea would be to stay put that was exactly what we did”. After about another three hours or so, we were rescued by a family that happened, to be on their way to the Outer Banks of North Carolina what a coincidence. We were taken safely back to our families after a long car ride.