February 13th

OUT OF THE FOG

After last Sunday's fog-cloaked adventure during which it felt as if we'd been transported back to Sherlock Holmes' London, especially with Trish's colorfully accented admonishments to "stay in the boat!", this Sunday dawned with brilliant orange and pink skies and San Diego's more typical blinding sunshine. The water was green and as flat as an ironed sheet. Canadian geese bobbed for grubs and other delicious morsels in the mud flats along the shore and small coot-like birds dove and swam around our 10-person boat.

Cheance announced that we would be doing "Pyramids" in honor of the recent events in Egypt. This type of pyramid turned out to involve paddling stints of gradually increasing time periods interspersed with short rests. So, we paddled for a minute, then rested, paddled for two minutes, then rested some more, three minutes, more rest, and then the whole thing backwards. We did this several times, though not as many as Cheance would have liked! Unfortunately, we also did not have time for the "Chaos" drill, much to the disappointment of those who look forward to the excitement of "chaos" each week. Maybe Thursday! The practice went smoothly and our paddling rate was a strong 60 strokes per minute. Hopefully, we may soon increase it to 70, 80, 90, and beyond!

Cheance and several team members stayed on past 9:15 to train the new team members-

-JB

February 10th

Welcome to night time paddling on the bay- its so fun and de-LIGHT-ful with wristbands a-glow.

We are now meeting and paddling on Thursdays- on the water at 6:15pm for an hour- Meet at 6- get glow bracelets, and hands-on so we can get a nice full hour of training.

February 6

Hey team! Thanks for braving the elements and early morning to join us for an interesting and challenging practice. When the other boat pulled away, they were swallowed by the fog before they hit 20 strokes! The pea-soup fog was eerie and yet peaceful. So much so that we couldnt even hear the boat as their paddles hit the water! Nevertheless, we paddled a good long hard practice covering 5 more miles on our trek to Long Beach. I will down load the GPS shoreline venture a little later. We are counting down our days, hours, minutes left until the first race of our "season" in Tempe AZ coming up March 26 and 27th. Its going to be a lot of fun preparing for teh event as well as racing!
Remember we added Thursday nights to our schedule this week- on the water at 6:15pm- so please try to get to the boats by 6 so we can be back to the beach by 7:15.