Full Moon Paddle

The name says it all. No, really it doesn't. The rivers continue to rise around here. This spring has been really wet and the rivers are at or over capacity. This has led to the canceling  of some of my paddles. But others have gone off with just my core paddlers, not newbies. Friday night's (Almost) Full Moon Paddle, May 24,  being a good example.

Dusk but the camera was functioning well, and my post-processing wasn't too shabby either

This is the moon, 9:00 pm or so and fully dark, yowza!

Really, this is the moon, just hard to believe, huh?

The river rose at least 6 inches or more during our 11 mile paddle over three hours. It was nice to land and stretch at the park down river but that made for a heck of a workout going up river against the briskly moving current.  And while there was a steady 10 mile an hour wind , there were also 25-30 miles gusts that would just swoop in on us and then vanish. My neck was sore the next morning.

Moving along, I note when I blogged last that I seemed to feel some despair over my apparently poor choice of boats. I've totally gotten over that feeling. It lasted maybe a day. It was like buyer's remorse, something I've never actually experienced so I am just guessing here. Anyway, when I paddled that boat the next time the feeling that I had bought the wrong boat had completely evaporated. This was probably due to the fact that I was out with a relatively fast paddling crowd and the Solstice kept me from falling miles behind.

She's a long skinny tricky vixen

Truthfully I don't really enjoy speeding along. I like to take my time, photographing wildlife and just soaking up the scenery. Everything is prettier from the water. It's just a fact of paddling life. So, the fact is I LIKE to paddle slow. Weird, huh? Rather than being concerned with how twitchy my Solstice is in rough water I think I should be more concerned with the fact that my paddling companions are a bunch of speed-addicted gorilla-armed freaks.

I mean, seriously, what's the hurry?? I even created a little niche club for the soak-it-all-in crowd. But the only paddlers I get regularly are the hairless gorillas. Oh, there are some ladies too, but mostly they are also speed freaks, just less overly muscle bound and testosterone laden.

So I deliberately scheduled a leisure paddle for Friday morning. I will report back on the topic of speed. Of course, from what I can see I only have myself and two other paddlers so may not have much to report on after all.