When I was a girl, we used to go rowing on the river on summer Saturdays. There were three rivers near us which could go on. The Tamar, the Lynher and the Tavy, and they all joined up into one river just above the dockyard. Which one we chose on any particular Saturday depended on when the tide would be high for that day. High tide was when the river was full of water, and low tide was when the water level in the river was so low that it had uncovered huge areas of wet and very gloopy mud. In between those times, the flow of water in the river would be either upriver or downriver, often at a rate very hard to row against if you wanted to make any headway in the wrong direction.
The way to make it work for us was to launch the boat from the car trailer at one of a number of free and almost deserted ad-hoc slipways, then row up or down the river with the tidal flow, and when the tide turned and the flow reversed itself we could easily return to where we had launched from. Like walking upstairs on an 'Up' escalator, then walking down again on the 'Down' escalator, except river water instead of moving metal steps.
The boat was a fourteen-foot wooden rowing boat with a seat each for two oarspersons, another seat at the stern for the helmsperson and a few other seats for other people, all of whom would get their turn rowing or steering soon enough. Plus some extra space for the comprehensively-packed picnic hamper and hot drinks baskets, spare clothing for when it rained and towels and swimming stuff for when it was too hot not to have a dip in the river over the side of the boat or from anywhere along either bank.
My father didn't think that girls should get away with an easy life so I was taught how to row with two oars and how to steer, just the same as my two older brothers learned when they were young. And like Mum and Dad did too when they were young, back in the mists of time. My arm and back muscles grew rapidly when I started to row and soon I was as good as anyone else. Not only that, but when each of us was thirteen, Dad taught us how to reverse the car and boat trailer safely, how to launch the boat by reversing the car down to the water's edge then unhitching the trailer and launching the boat. And how to recover it at the end of the day and strap it safely to its trailer.
Sometimes we knew we'd get back to the launch site when the tide was too low. The car could not reverse across thirty yards of mud, of course, so getting the boat back onto the car trailer involved one end of a rope being attached to the trailer which was pushed into the water and the other end of the rope to the car on dry land, plus much heaving, lifting and shoving.
Technically illegal but nonetheless a good skill to acquire, a thirteen-year-old girl safely reversing a car and trailer with a boat on it on slippery shingle? A dark art indeed!
Occasionally there wasn't enough water in the river for the trailer to submerge fully enough to easily get the boat onto the trailer so we'd have to almost lift the boat onto the trailer while the trailer was not quite submerged, our bare feet squelching around in mud and water up to our waists. But this was all part of the fun. And it was fun.
The rivers themselves would be too narrow and tidal for bigger boats to use, so there were no white plastic gin-palaces with twin outboard engines and snooty people showing off. Every so often a small sailing dinghy with one or two people on board would fly - or slowly work its way against the wind - up or down river, or a couple of kayakers would whizz up or down river. Once in earshot of each other, we would shout 'morning!' or 'afternoon!' to each other, never mind if we knew them or not, before they sailed away.
And occasionally, we would be passed by a passenger river cruiser with a name like 'River Maid' or 'Tamar Princess'. We would wave at the poor tourists who had paid a tenner each just to go up and down the river in a boat where the advertised bar was never open. They would wave back, wondering why we were having fun and they weren't.
The rivers themselves were about one or two hundred yards wide, with woods or farmland coming down to each bank, continuing upstream like this for many miles. Almost the entire length of both banks would be considered a beach, although only shingle at the high water mark becoming muddier and muddier the lower the tide was. You could land almost anywhere, tie the boat to a tree or anchor it in shallow water, and walk along the shore in either direction. There were no built-up areas except at the bottom end of the rivers near the Saltash bridge and very few other people on land or water. Think Ratty and Mole from the Wind In The Willows.
As we got older, Mum and Dad did less and less rowing, then as they got older they'd not come in the boat at all, they'd drive to the designated picnic site at the designated time. By this time they felt we were safe enough as teenagers to enjoy the whole day by ourselves. At length, my brothers got married and moved away, regretfully enjoying their last day on the river.
However, by that time, I'd made my own friends and initiated them in the arts of rowing and steering the boat. They loved it. When I was old enough to drive (legally, ahem), Mum and Dad let me hitch up the boat trailer and drive from home to the launch site, whichever one was best that day, with two or three of my friends and we'd have our day on the river just like the old times of my childhood.
One day sticks in my mind particularly. It must have been the hottest day that summer, and my three besties were all free that day and the tide was perfect - high at two o'clock in the afternoon so just right for putting the boat in at Weir Quay and drifting lazily up the Tamar. It must have been the last time we ever went out on the river together.
Lauren, Ella and Jess had been out many times before and we all knew the drill. We launched the boat, remembering to transfer the picnic hampers and drinks baskets and other vital equipment, and parked the car and trailer.
To begin with, Lauren and Ella were the two oarspersons and I steered. 'Bow' and 'Stroke', with 'bow' nearest the front of the boat with one pair of oars, facing backwards looking at stroke's back, and 'stroke' also facing backwards with the other pair of oars, sitting in the middle of the boat looking at the helmsperson who was holding the tiller. We wanted to get around the next couple of bends in the river quite quickly, so Lauren and Ella set to work and we were soon flying through the water and, more to the point, watching the river banks each side pass us even faster than they were rowing because the river water was flowing in our direction, too.
They eased back a little after half an hour. The river was much more secluded from here on, and it was getting hot in the morning sunshine. We swapped around. Jess and I rowed and Ella steered while Lauren lay in the bottom of the boat on a groundsheet and soaked up the sunshine. We swapped again every so often, each of us getting hotter and hotter, taking off more of our clothes each time, and rowing slower and slower now that we were far upriver out of sight of nearly everybody. As more skin was uncovered, it would be plastered in sun tan lotion.
Soon, we were all in bra and knickers only, our outer clothes having been shed piece by piece and left in a heap on a spare seat. The rowing that Lauren and I were doing now was very little, just enough to keep the boat facing the right direction while the incoming tide took us up river. Even so, I was hot. I pulled the oars across in front of me.
“I'm sorry, ladies,” I gasped. “I'm going to need to take my bra off. Anyone mind?”
We all looked at each other, fearful of being the first one to go full lezzo and earn teases and laughter from the others. We looked at each other, seeing who would be the first to say 'OK'. I was beginning to sweat under my arms. No one said yes, no one said no.
“I'll take that as a 'no'!” I decided out loud, and slipped my bra off and tossed it into the bottom of the boat.
My breasts heaved a metaphorical sigh of relief at no longer being covered by a hot and slightly sweaty pad of material. What little breeze there was blowing up the river danced around each breast as they popped out of their cups and I began to enjoy the cooling feeling. The others turned to look at me. I was 'bow', so Ella and Jess could see my front from their seat, with only Lauren having to turn around to get a look.
Her face was only a couple of feet away from my size E's.
“Whoa, Nat, what's that you've got there?” she asked.
“Well, we all know what size we all are,” I replied, not very grammatically. “What did you expect?”
Ella and Jess took a closer look now that someone else had made the first comment about the size of my boobs and they didn't have to worry that they were the first to look, as Lauren had sorted that little issue for them. And it was true, we all knew each other well enough to know not only our cup sizes but our band sizes, waist and hip measurements. Probably our hat sizes, blood groups and shoe sizes as well, but by now we were all in bare feet so that question didn't arise. When we were young teenagers our body and boob size figures had been endless topics of conversation. The conversations were theoretical in nature, the one thing we had never done was to gratuitously strip and flaunt our tits or, um, anywhere else either.
Usually, when you're in a boat on water, whether a river or the open sea, you need to keep some clothes on because it's never as warm on the water as it looks in the photographs. Ask anyone who has modelled bikinis on a boat. And also, you can get sunburned from the wind and freeze at the same time.
So this was the first time ever that any of us had actually seen anyone else's boobs. And it was the first time they'd seen mine, and the first time I had let them. Outwardly nonchalant, but with my heart beating inside me, I reached for my sun tan cream and applied a good dollop to my breasts and rubbed it all around each one. Underneath, each side and on top too. I sat there attending to myself while the three girls continued to check me out, watching each hand movement and each smear of lotion being smoothed onto each boob. The boat began to rotate sideways and I could sense that 'stroke' Lauren was too busy staring at my boobs to worry about whether we would be wrecked on the Inchcape Rock or not so I dipped my oars in the water and pointed us upstream again.
“What?” I said, in a tone of complete and girlish innocence.
Having had a large bust since my mid-teens I had grown totally accustomed to the two protrusions sticking out of my chest. They were constantly at the bottom of my point of view in whichever direction I looked. Them being attached to me all day every day including Christmas and New Year had soon made me ignore them totally except when someone or something drew attention to them. Now, however, it was different. I'd exposed myself in public in full view of three of my closest friends who were staring at them from only a couple of feet away.
My arms kept slowly dipping my oars into the water and lazily keeping the boat straight, while the tide took us further upstream. I looked down at my chest, my boobs moving gently in response to the movement of my arms and glistening with sun tan lotion.
“Well, I'm hot, too,” Lauren acknowledged, pulling her cups away from her chest and fanning them with her other hand. “Anyone else mind if ...?”
Before she'd finished her question there were two bras being hastily unstrapped and tossed into the pile on the seat. In a sudden moment of panic that we might be being letched over by hordes of voyeurs with telescopes and Go-Pros, we all looked around us and up and down the river. There was a sailing dinghy about a mile downstream but no other living being in sight, on water or land. Our heart rates settled back to normal out of 'panic and hysteria' mode. We looked at each other, our gaze slowly dropping from faces to busts. Even I forgot to row for a few moments and the boat slowly rotated a few times in a random eddy.
The one still wearing her bra was Ella, who looked as hot and sweaty as the rest of us. We looked at her enquiringly. Without saying anything she indicated her chest. She wore a bra with small cups set further apart than most.
“I'm embarrassed about having tiny tits,” she explained.
“Well, we're not, so off with it and we won't be unkind - we're your friends!”
She sighed and reluctantly allowed her bra to join the others on the pile. She seemed to take ages to remove her hands and forearms from shielding her bust.
This was the moment, then, when all those conversations we'd had sitting on the floor of our various bedrooms, usually mine, while pretending to do homework suddenly began to mean something. I had always been the big-breasted girl in our group, and in our school, too, but we won't go there. Lauren and Jess were normal, sometimes wishing for bigger breasts to try to please the current crush and sometimes glad not to have ones that fell out everywhere or bounced up and down when we walked, ran or went upstairs at the wrong speed, like mine. When I was doing sports at school like netball, hockey and running, my bra budget was massive, each bra seeming to need reinforced titanium steel cross girders in all of the three dimensions plus high tensile shock absorbers around the back.
Ella's boobs were the smallest and thinnest, something that we now realised had been a problem issue for Ella for all that time.
Jess had another issue to deal with at school, being a black girl with parents both black themselves. In our group, we very rarely thought about her colour, and about the only time the subject came up was when we went clothes shopping it was always Jess that went for the bright primary colours. Her bra now lying in the heap was bright yellow whereas ours were nude or some other pale pastel colour.
We all looked at each other's breasts. My golden globes, Lauren's beautiful boulders, Jess's black beauties and Ella's petite pearls. No one spoke for several minutes. No one moved, either. We simply stared at each other's breasts, all of them shining in the late morning sunshine. Not just our sizes were different, either. The breast shapes varied among the four of us, and the size, colour and direction of each areola and nipple were different, too. Our gazes had centred on mine to start with, but on cue, we transferred our gazes to Lauren, then Jess. Each person got the stare from the others. Curiously, no one - not even Ella - seemed 'too shy to show' or wanting to shield herself from scrutiny.
We all just held our chests available for the others to gawp at for as long as we wanted, although Ella seemed to be still the shyest person present. In all our conversations on my bedroom floor, she always had the least to say. I guess in her mind her breasts were the least normal or usual or desirable so she let most of us do the teenage bravado talk while she just nodded along with the flow, keeping her own small breasts out of the limelight.
“Well, here they are. My tiny titties,” she sighed. “I've been waiting for and dreading this moment. You're all so pretty, and I'm the one with pimples instead of breasts.”
We focussed more carefully on her pimples. She bravely bared her breasts as she sat on the back seat holding the boat's tiller. Each breast was roughly the size of half a tennis ball poking out about a couple of inches from her chest, and they sat wider apart across her chest than most breasts, even small ones. The areola, the darkened part of each breast with the nipple in the middle, covered nearly one half of the surface of the breast. The nipples were normal-sized nipples but they looked big in comparison to the rest of her breast. Between her breasts was a flat but athletic chest.
The rest of Ella was fit and trim. She had always been the super sportswoman, good at everything from running to basketball, swimming and keeping goal in the hockey team. As for my sporting achievements, I would have been good at darts, snooker or tiddly-winks if I had bothered.
“When I was at school, I always wanted to have a body like yours so I could actually win something sometime,” I said.
Lauren and Jess agreed. Ella pouted.
“Well, it's available for hire at a low rent,” she replied. “Queue here!”
She seemed to come to a decision. She dropped the sad face for a happy one and looked around. The boat was still being carried upstream by the slackening tide, but it was facing the wrong way.
“Come on, row then!” she laughed, yanking on the tiller meaningfully.
Helmspersons can get like that, sometimes. Very pushy. Lots of shouty orders. We ignored her anyway.
There was a pause while the others applied sun tan lotion to themselves in the newly exposed areas. Anyway, it was time for another crew change, so Lauren set her oars so that she could move to a spare seat to one side. I then moved to her seat, and Ella clambered past me towards the front of the boat where she became 'bow'. I sat in her place at the tiller becoming helmsperson, and Jess moved into the 'stroke' position.
And while each of us was moving, the others stared at the dangling breasts displayed by the person doing the moving. In a small boat, one of the tricks is that only one person moves at one time, and another trick is that you should only move around when you are bending low so you don't stand up and fall overboard. This gave the rest of us ample opportunity to focus on the one item of interest at any moment. And that was each person's newly exposed boobs, and how they swung around while the owner of them was manoeuvering herself past us in a crouching position.
While Ella was clambering past me with her little breasts clinging to her chest like limpets to a rock, they passed within inches of my face. It was all I could do not to put my hand out and touch them as she passed me. Rule number three in a small boat is that no one shall unexpectedly squeeze another woman's breasts while she is moving from one seat to another in case she jumps in surprise and falls into the river. Actually, I just made that rule up, but it's true anyway.
We settled ourselves into our new positions, and the two oarspersons slid their oars into the water and re-orientated the boat upriver once more. None of us were looking around, our eyes were firmly fixed on items of interest inboard. And there was plenty to look at.
“Morning ladies!”
The voice came out of the blue at the same moment as the sailing dinghy did, the one I'd seen earlier a long way away. Along with the sound of the voice calling out his greeting across a few feet of water, there was the sudden rush of fast-moving bow-wave and stern-wake noises. We all jumped out of our skins and found ourselves looking at a sailing dinghy crewed by two young men dressed in warm waterproof clothing with buoyancy aids built in, as it rushed towards us, its large white sails looming up to us like the iceberg meeting the Titanic. One of them called out some order or command and suddenly their sails flapped a couple of times, swung across their boat and they had changed course and were rapidly sailing away from us, both of the men looking back at us, laughing and waving.
For a second there was pandemonium on board our boat. Hands flew up across busts, other hands scrabbled desperately for our clothes, or anybody's clothes, oar blades splashed into the water and the boat rocked. However, of course, it was far too late. The damage had been done and our naked chests were probably going to be uploaded to YouTube from the dinghy's SailCam, if it had one and if that was a thing anyway.
When we'd recovered from our surprise, happily no one wanted to dress in their clothes again, or turn around and go home. We simply muttered 'oh crap!' to ourselves and continued to sit in the sunshine getting a tan on our untanned areas, with Ella revelling in her new-found confidence. 'Bow' and 'stroke' rowed a couple of strokes so the helmsperson could point the boat upstream again and the bras we'd grabbed were returned to the pile without a word.
I was still hot. This time the only thing I could do about it was to take off my knickers. I wondered how to achieve this.
“I'm still hot,” I announced. “I ...”
Before I could finish the sentence, Lauren spoke.
“Well, take 'em off then!”
No one else chipped in, they just looked at me smiling expectantly, so I did. I slid my knickers down my legs while my knees were as together as they could be. They joined the pile of bras. I kept my legs together religiously for the next thirty seconds in case someone in this boat or any other boat that happened to be passing should see me, not just bra-less but knicker-less with my legs wide apart as well. However, by the end of thirty seconds, there were four of us with no bra and no knickers on either. Again the focus of our gaze shifted downwards to one person at a time. More suntan lotion was applied to more nether regions.
You could run a survey of a certain group of people, say, naked young women on a rowing boat in a river on the Devon and Cornwall border. You could compare and contrast their breasts and nipples. And for a bonus point, you could also compare their pussy hair-trimming styles and labia types. Again, no one turned a hair (to coin a phrase). Each of us simply widen our legs sufficiently to allow the others to get a good close-up view of everything there was to see.
We were all different, upstairs as well as downstairs. Biggest to smallest boobs were: me, Lauren, Jess then Ella. Hairiest pussies in order of hairiness were: Lauren, and Ella, with me and Jess scoring zero on the scale, although to be fair, Lauren and Ella had trimmed themselves very neatly leaving only a thin line or trace of hair just above their labia. Smoothest lips were: Lauren, Ella, me with Jess coming last. My lips were a little bit wrinkly for my age, more wrinkly than most twenty-three-year-olds.
And, no, it's not from overuse or too many large-diameter vibrators, thank you.
Jess's lips were quite smooth - smoother than mine, but she had a small piece of something which hung down between her lips as if something had got stuck there some time ago and it had stayed there.
We stared at her lips longer than we stared at everybody else's. Knowing what we were looking at, she widened her legs further still and flicked the hanging bit with her finger.
“Does that get in the way, Jess?” I asked. “It looks like it might get caught in things.”
“I'm a bit careful when I shave down there.”
She pointedly didn't explain what happened each time her boyfriend shoved his cock up there. And we didn't ask, although we all knew each other's boyfriends, past and present.
“Aren't we all?” I agreed.
This made everyone look at mine again. Lips that had receded, widened wrinkled and separated a little. I spread it around with my finger.
I suddenly realised that one of us, being me, should be keeping an eye out for the return of the sailing dinghy with the two men on it. I dragged my eyes up and away from inside the boat and looked around.
“Guys ...” I called out, pointing outside the boat.
There, quietly approaching us and chatting to each other were two women in kayaks, wearing the usual helmets and safety gear. They came up closer to us and stopped paddling. Their kayaks sat in the water only a few feet from us. There were no more shrieks from us, we very quickly picked up on their genders. We all covered our naked busts with our hands in time-honoured style, but quickly removed them again and looked at the women.