Nautical Mishaps

I'm a water baby, through and through. I was born in a Naval hospital where the San Luis Rey meets the Pacific Ocean and grew up splashing in my diapers in the shallows of the small river and paddling my kickboard along with the seals in the Pacific swells. I spend much of my life stepping into liquid, and as the statistics will have it, if you spend enough time doing something, there are bound to be mistakes. In middle school, I paddled a homemade raft across Deam's Lake and had a great time showing off my creative means of transport. The next summer, I tried to repeat the feat even though I lacked the ropes to tie the logs together. The rags with which I eventually pieced the raft together held long enough for me to get halfway across the lake. Then, right in the middle of the lake (sounds kind of familiar, huh?), the logs decided to take off in each of the four cardinal directions, leaving me to wrestle/paddle one of them into some pond scum in an attempt to make it across the rest of the lake. If you remember middle school at all, you probably remember that it was a bit of an awkward time. Imagine a 13 year old tomboy trying to keep her dignity while trying to navigate a log through thick, stinking algae and trying not to attract the attention of onshore fishermen, or worse, fellow 13 year olds. It wasn't my first nautical mishap, nor was it my last, but I certainly learned the importance of a good vessel and practice. Obviously, I'm still learning.

This weekend I helped reinforce these lessons with our fledgling adventure racing team, Team ODP, at the first installment of the Desert Rage series in Escondito, CA. The weekend began the second that my lab meeting ended on Friday afternoon and I raced across Tempe down to Chandler to meet Hannah and Angel. We loaded bikes, three sets of kayak paddles, life jackets, helmets, lots of fluids and energy foods, and a huge seemingly harmless mesh bag that contained an inflatable kayak. We drove out to San Diego, spent the night at one of Hannah's friend's house, and drove early the next morning out to Lake Hodges, less than 20 miles from where I learned to swim. Before we even pulled into the parking lot, I knew that something was terribly wrong. Fifteen foot kayaks were strapped to the roofs of just about every car. Some even had trailers for their boats. We had a mesh bag that suddenly didn't seem so big at all. We opened up the bag and let the monster out, pumping it up to all of the yellow glory that the thing could possess, about 8 feet in all. This inflatable monster was Team ODP's version of a racing kayak, and in the pre-race excitement, we still did not quite understand the error of our ways. All we knew was that we did not have to pay to rent a kayak, and we did not have to strap the thing to our roof. This all sounded great until about 8:02 a.m. on raceday. Once we got our transition area staked out and went through details during the pre-race meeting, where we were given our passport, instructions, and a map. The instructions detailed that the first checkpoint could be reached by 4 miles of running or 1.5 miles of paddling. 1.5 < 4 =easy

(ok, i tried to add a picture here, and ended up screwing up the entire post. great job Kessans... when I find the time, I'll repost about the race).