Our guests left around 10am, and we set about cleaning the house.  I had such a good time walking the sand flats that I dragged my wife out for a walk around noon to explore around the north end of the island.

Things we well under control around 3 in the afternoon, so I decided to go for a row.  Just about all of my rows have gone north into Wellfleet Harbor, generally to ge some shelter from the prevailing SW winds.  Today, with very light winds, I decided to go south along the Eastham shore.

It was a very enjoyable trip.  I wanted to row for about 90 minutes, which at my plodding pace in the Aero would take me about 15km.  I was just going to row south for 7.5km and turn around and come home.

The trip was in about 6 legs.

• From the beach to Red Buoy #10 (across the incoming tide)
• Southeast from the red buoy to the Eastham shore (incoming tide on the starboard bow)
• South along the shore until 7.5km (straight into the tide)
• NNE along the shore until I got to the southern edge of Lt Island (with the tide)
• Follow the shore around to the northwest corner of the island (not much tidal current)
• Back to the beach, with a little bonus distance to get to 15km. (with the tide, this was fun!)

As I rowed, I kept track of distance and time.  You can see the HR climbing as I approached 5K.  I wanted to be sure I did that in less than 30 minutes.  Then I eased off a little bit, until I was getting close to 7.5km, which I wanted to get done in under 45m.

I finished that about a minute and a half ahead of the pace  plan, and took about that amount of time to drink some water and turn the boat.

Coming back with the tide, I got way ahead of the plan, but I was having fun pushing a bit harder, so I went with it.   Then when I passed the northwest corner, and saw the pace getting faster from the tide, I wanted even more, so I kicked up the rate a bit and tried to hold about a 2:15 pace.

I saw that I would be short of 15km, so I headed a bit north toward the indian head shore line.  I turned back when I reached the floats marking the corners of the commercial oyster beds.  Then I just rowed until the speedcoach clicked over 15km.

I coasted to a stop had a drink and paddle back to the beach.

Fantastic!

I took a quick look at the iphone versus speedcoach GPS data on the charting SW.  Generally it lines up very well.

If you zoom in you can see some differences.  The most noticeable difference was the turn at 7.5km.  The error there is 40m.

We left the cape around 8:30 and it took us nearly 3 hours to get home.  I slept in instead of rowing this morning.  I’m going to go do a quick 10K on the erg at lunch instead.