On the third day, we still had no wind. In the morning, we were given the option of joining a little local race. Since everybody else was doing it, I went along with it. Now evidently this was a new race, and the organizer wasn’t the most organized guy in the world. It was billed as 2.5 miles, although according to my GPS it was actually only about 2.1 miles. I got a bit of a sticker shock when I found out it was $32 to enter! Compare and contrast with Baycreek’s weekly 2.0 mile time trials that are $8 to enter and have hot dogs and beer afterwards. But then again the Baycreek time trials are probably considered advertising and goodwill for the shop.
So anyway, we lined up at the start. As expected, Erik Borgnes, Rob Hartman, Nick Murray and one other guy whose name I didn’t catch disappeared into the distance. I was chasing Greg Greene’s wake, and I wasn’t sure if I was catching it or not when he suddenly started veering well off to the left. That left Bill, the super fit guy from Iowa who went for a bike ride in the mornings while the rest of us where getting our breakfasts, just a bit ahead of me. For about a kilometer I thought I was catching him, but he started to pull away. In spite of Greg’s diversion, he was pulling away from me as well. And at the finish, there wasn’t a water finish line like we’d been told, we basically had to ram our boats onto the beach. Yeah, I wasn’t going to do that, so I threw my feet into the water and stopped and then slowly paddled in close enough to get out without scraping my new boat. Anyway, I think I was seventh overall, and in spite of the fact that there weren’t any 180 degree turns to slow me down, my time was slower than the Baycreek Time Trial last week.
We hung around for the awards (very fancy) and a bit of chat, and then paddled back the reverse of the course back to the cars. We loaded up and went back to the lodge for lunch.
After lunch, we went back to the same put-in we’d used on Thursday evening and paddled almost exactly the same course out to the bouy and back. This time Rob and Erik were really spending a lot of time on technique, and I got some real help with my catch and pull splashing problem. It hasn’t become natural yet, but I’ll keep working on it – I’ve changed my stroke a few times already, so I’m sure I can do it again.
Afterwards we went back to the lodge for socializing and dinner. Dinner seemed like it was very late, but maybe the level of effort was catching up to me. It was really good, though. Nick is an excellent cook. After dinner all conversation turned to the weather forecast – it appeared we were going to get a strong north wind for Sunday, and after a brief discussion we had a plan to paddle a stretch of Grand Traverse Bay that would actually pass the familiar bouy and end up at the same put-in as we’d visited two times before. Not long afterwards, I crashed and went to bed.