Saturday May 24

The kids and I were up to Nanaimo for the day for the zone 6 time trials for the BC summer games. 

The day before, Eva did a bicycling fundraiser at her school and went 160 laps of the track on her cargo bike. 

Then today she woke up early with us to drive two hours to do the thing that scared her most. 2000 meters in a racing kayak when she is really an outrigger paddler. Those racing kayaks are really tippy and she has always been irrationally terrified (her words) when she has to paddle in one. But she decided to give it a go on Saturday anyway. 

And did really well. 2000 metres without a hitch. I feel so proud of her. 

She did a second race, 500 metres, and made it to within 2 metres of the finish before the wake from the coach boat caught up with her and came at her sideways and then over she went. The worst happened. But overall, it was still ok. She said racing kayaks have moved up in her scale from "loathe it" to between "don't like it" and "tolerable".

Julias and his friend did their races too. No tipping there.  No problems. 

A different challenge we had that day involved bringing the kayak with on the roof top of my sisters car. When started from home it was making a humming noise. The tie down straps were acting like instrumental strings to the big sound box that was the upside down kayak. We stopped a few times to adjust them first tighter then looser in an effort to get rid of the multi pitched hum, but tighter just made it go up in pitch and get really loud. We only managed to mute the noise slightly in the end and had arrived at the lake all slightly frazzled by the barrage of noise. Eva used the tuner app on her iPod and declared it to be just higher than a B at one point. 

Happily, oh so happily, on the way back down, Julias suggested a twist in the straps on either side of the boat and, oh joy! it worked. There was blessed silence coming from the roof. So we were able to sing to Abba on the return trip instead of using earbuds as earplugs like on the way up. 

L