Tiger's excellent adventure; Stuffed animal found after floating away from Orillia beach
Julie Langpeter
Local News - Thursday, August 31, 2006 @ 08:00
Like all good fairy tales, this one has a happy ending.
It involves a tiger striking out on his own, surfing along the waves of a lake called Couchiching, then being saved by kayaking pirates and returned to his family.
Kevin Dillon was at Couchiching Beach Park with his daughter Sarah, 6, when the girl noticed something was amiss.
They had spent the previous week on holiday with Tiger tagging along everywhere they went. Tiger, a stuffed tiger Sarah has had since she was two, went on a glass-bottomed boat and ate a seafood dinner in Tobermory.
It went on a SpongeBob SquarePants ride, strapped into its own seat, at Science North in Sudbury. It got buried in the sand at Wasaga Beach.
Back home in Orillia, the trio continued the holiday with a trip to the beach, little surfboard in tow. But, as Sarah played with seaweed on the sand, she noticed someone was missing. Tiger and the surfboard were no longer on the beach.
Dillon and his daughter searched the park, but couldn't find Tiger. Kids at a nearby day camp said they had spotted Tiger floating on a surfboard near the boats in the Port of Orillia.
"Can you imagine? That means he floated all the way around the government dock in the lake. That's like an ocean for a tiger," said Dillon.
Father and daughter headed to the port without much hope. They searched and searched, but couldn't find Tiger anywhere.
They spotted some high school students in kayaks near the port, so Dillon offered them money if they could locate the surfboard or Tiger.
"They didn't look like pirates, but they were pirates," said Sarah.
After a short search, one of the kayakers found Tiger, still on his surfboard, caught in weeds in a boat slip.
He had stayed on the surfboard despite the waves and the several hundred metres he had travelled.
Sarah has her own take on things.
"Tiger fell off the surfboard, but he climbed back up," she said.
Since Dillon didn't have much cash on him at the time, the pirates were paid most of their booty in the form of a plastic bag of change, not so far off from a leather satchel full of gold doubloons.
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