Chicken Soup for the Soul Christmas Treasury for Kids: A Story a Day From December 1st Through Christmas for Kids and Their Families by Jack Canfield & Mark Victor Hansen

Author:Jack Canfield & Mark Victor Hansen [Canfield, Jack & Hansen, Mark Victor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Motivational & Inspirational, Christian, Holidays & Celebrations, Body; Mind & Spirit, Self-Help, Christmas & Advent, Holidays, Religion, Inspiration & Personal Growth, Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 9781453275375
Google: UuPipvNAAtkC
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2002-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Beacon of Faith

Probably the biggest problem that Christmas poses to a sixteen-year-old girl is what to give her father. Mothers are easy; they always need everything. But there seem to be so few gift options for dads: ties, socks, a new belt. . . .

As Robyn Stevens of Hancock, Maine, pondered the dilemma of what to get her father for Christmas 1991, she thought about how her grandmother always talked about the usefulness of flashlights. “You should always have one in your car,” her grandmother would say. “And you should always have a couple in the house—you just never know when you might need one.”

It seemed to Robyn that she had her answer. So she bought a flashlight for her father, Arthur Stevens. It wasn’t anything fancy—just an ordinary, three-cell, garden-variety model she got at Sears. “I thought he’d really like it,” she remembers, “because it was waterproof and he spends a lot of time on the water.”

Arthur Stevens opened his present on Christmas morning, grinned at his daughter and asked, “How did you know that this was just what I needed?”

Neither Robyn nor Arthur knew just how much he would come to need his gift.

On January 16, Arthur was twenty-five miles out to sea in the Gulf of Maine, along with crew members Captain Rudy Musetti and Dwayne Cleaves, and they were bringing the tugboat Harkness home from a construction job.

About halfway through the journey, the Harkness and its crew found themselves sailing straight into a nightmare. It was approaching 6 P.M. and had been dark for about three hours. The temperature had dropped drastically. With the winds at twenty-five miles an hour, the windchill factor was minus sixty degrees.

A little after 6 P.M., Captain Musetti checked the stern and saw, to his horror, that it was taking on water fast. He couldn’t leave the safety of the pilothouse to see what was wrong because the tug was pitching violently and the decks were sheer ice. There was also sea smoke to contend with—six feet of impenetrable condensation above the ocean, caused by the temperature difference between ocean and air.

Captain Musetti radioed the Coast Guard station at Southwest Harbor: “We’re going down.”

As it happened, the Harkness was sinking just off Matinicus Island, where the few families who lived there during winter were just settling down for dinner. Vance Bunker heard the radio conversations between the Harkness and the Coast Guard and knew that the three men aboard didn’t stand a chance if he didn’t set out to rescue them himself. The tugboat was too far out for the Coast Guard to reach it in time.

He and two other lobstermen, Rick Kohls and Paul Murray, left their dinners and families behind and set out in the Jan Ellen, Vance’s thirty-six-foot lobster boat. None of them was sure exactly where the sinking tug was, and because of the smoke and the iced-up windshield, they couldn’t see anything. All they could do was forge ahead into the darkness to where they thought the tug might be.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.