Weather: Sunny, 70F, light shifty wind from the WNW about 2-4 mph.  Wind was not really a factor, but slowed me down at times.

Plan:

• 6′ Rate Ladders
• 3′ @ 17 / 2′ @ 19 / 1′ @ 21
• 1′ rests when I turned at the ends of the river.
• Technique Notes:  Keep the drive smooth.  Get the blades off the water.

Notice the purple box?  If you look over to the right hand side at the speed scale, it indicates that I was going 4600 km/h.  Pretty nice acceleration, eh?

What actually happened was the Dual XGPS160 unit and it took me a little while to notice.  The interesting thing is that the pace and distance seemed to update for a while after the point where the straight line started.  I thought it was only about 30 seconds or so where I saw the pace and distance frozen before I stopped and cycled power on the unit, but the data is missing for nearly 9 minutes.  Some weird s**t going on here.

Cycling the power made everything happy again.

Today was a day of mishaps.  On my last trip down the river,  Was trying to squeeze in the end of a ladder and I pushed it too far.  There is a cable across the river with big orange floats (about 18″ in diameter) strung on it.  I put on the brakes, and tried to turn, but managed to get my bow and starboard oar blade under the cable between two floats, and my boat basically parallel to the float line.  What ensued was an ungainly display of backing and forthing and turning and wobbling as I tried to get my bow extracted, my boat turned around and get myself clear.  It was an ugly demonstration of what not to do in a boat.

After that, I finished the journey up river and was approaching the dock.  There are a few challenges to deal with.  First, there was a bit of cross wind.  No big deal.  Second, there is an underwater propeller under one side of the dock that is artificially creating a current to try to keep area by the dock clear of weeds.  Also no big deal if you approach the other side of the dock.  Third, is the weeds themselves.  They are floating in great clumps right now.  This was the cause of my downfall today.  I was aiming to put my bow about a foot away from the side of the dock, so I would come in on the port side of the boat.  But when I was about 6 feet from the dock, my port oar caught a great hunk of weed, and turned my bow to the port side.

With a small bump, I hit the end of the dock.  No big deal, right.  The bow ball is there, right?  Well, on this specific dock, there is a 4″ wide gap between the board along the side of the dock and the one on the end of the dock, and my bow hit that gap with extraordinary precision, and the bow became wedged between the two bits of wood.  I had to back the boat with a fair amount of pressure to get it free, and it took a couple of strokes to do it.

Between those strokes, I was processing what the hell I would do if I couldn’t get it free.  I guess, jump out and swim.  That would have been pretty damn humiliating!  I’m glad it didn’t come to that.  There was no damage to the boat.  In the future, I will approach the dock with less speed and more paranoia.

Tomorrow:  8 x 750 / 4′ rest.