A story of why I'm afraid of water.

I remember really loving going for a swim in the ocean as a kid; nowadays the thought of it terrifies me.One of my earlier memories of bathing in the ocean comes from 1999. Our family was on vacation in Skopelos, a small Greek island. We were eating dinner at a restaurant with this Danish family we had met. It was pretty late at night, the adults were talking about some boring shit, so the Danish son came up to me asking if I wanted to go for a swim. Me, being seven years old, was all game, so we both went out to the beach.This was pretty much in the dead of night, and Greek island nights are dark as shit. It was just us two little kids, alone, on a pristine white beach and the moon barely lighting up the massive Mediterranean sea in front of us. Needless to say we thought that was fucking awesome, so we just dived into that shit. We didn't even bother getting out of our clothes.After a while one of us (I can't remember who) noticed a stack of white plastic beach chairs, and suggested we should try dragging one of them into the water to see if it would float. This sounded like a sweet idea, so we tried it, and lo and behold, not only did it float it could also support the weight of both of us. We simultaneously had the same idea: pirate ship!So we both got on this thing as it drifted out into the Mediterranean. We were singing pirate songs, he in Danish, me in in Swedish. Then, after a good while, I noticed that the lights from the island were getting pretty distant. In retrospect we probably weren't farther out than 200 yards at that point, but to a seven-year-old, that's still pretty damn far. I suggested that we should start paddling back ashore and my shipmate concured.But we couldn't. Our raft wouldn't have any of that shit so despite our best efforts we just keep drifting further and further away from the island.We spent the night on that beach chair. Even at that young age I realized that if I fell asleep I would fall into that great dark abyss and I'd never wake up again. My friend was crying, but whenever I tried moving over to comfort him the raft was in danger of flipping over. So we both just sat there, crying away as our raft kept drifting out into the ocean. When the sun came up I couldn't see the island, hell I couldn't see any land at all. I'll never forget that. It was just the massive blue sky and the massive blue ocean. And us two, on our shitty plastic beach chair, drifting away towards north Africa, I suppose.Shortly afterwards we were spotted by the crew of a Greek fishing boat. One of them jumped into the water, tied a rope to our raft and hauled us in. We were both pretty much catatonic at that point, and obviously none of the crew spoke Danish or Swedish, but we managed to explain that we had drifted from Skopelos. Luckily, that was were the fishermen were from as well, so they radioed in that they had found some really fucking stupid Scandinavian kids, and they would bring us back to the island once their shift was done. They gave us water and some crackers, and we promptly fell asleep.20 hours after the start of our jolly adventure we were reunited with our families.I haven't gone into the ocean ever since.