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Young Girl Uses a Clever Method of Quickly Bailing Out a Sinking Canoe With Her Legs

By Rain Noe - September 5, 2014

in Cars

The Bajau Laut people are sometimes called "Sea Gypsies," due to the fact that they live their lives on the ocean. "The Bajau Laut are some of the last true marine nomads," writes photographer James Morgan, who has documented parts of their lifestyle here. "An ethnic group of Malay origin, they have for centuries lived out their lives almost entirely at sea, plying a tract of ocean between Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia."

When your people's lives center around the ocean, it makes sense that you learn about dealing with water from a very young age. Case in point: After a Bajau Laut canoe carrying children took on water and sank, dumping its young occupants into the drink, this young girl managed to quickly bail the boat out in a surprising (to us Westerners) manner:

Meanwhile at least half of my adult-age, city-bred friends don't even know how to swim. We would have been clinging to the dock trying to Google how to do this on our phones.

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KROBUZ

10 years ago

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I tried this once with my canoe but the gunwales prevented the water from leaving. Ah, the good ol' days of dugouts.
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Sean

10 years ago

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Yea... Sure you did. Draw me the diagram of how that works on a American style canoe with vertical sides. You were probably on LSD and thought you did. Another know-it-all Baby Boomer. I bet you had to walk uphill both ways to get your canoe in the water too... In the snow. And now us "kids" are all doing it wrong. That little girl is friggin' amazing.
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Mjo

10 years ago

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Sorry. There's nothing new in this. We learned the same technique at summer camp in the early 1960s and it must have originated well before that.
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