Pelicans galore

I paddled for almost three hours this morning--175 minutes, to be exact.

I paddled around the Loosahatchie Bar today, and I usually do that much faster than I did today.  I think my fastest time, starting and finishing at Harbortown Marina, is a hair under two hours.  Most of the time I do it in two hours and 10 or 15 minutes.

But things went slower today.  One reason was that today's water level, around eleven and a half feet on the Memphis gauge, leaves a huge sandbar exposed at the north end of the Bar, requiring a paddler to go much farther upstream than he has to do at higher levels.

Another reason was that I had my Go Pro camera and hoped to get some footage of the pelicans that I had seen Wednesday.  And I wasn't disappointed: there was an even bigger flock hanging out at the same spot near the lower end of the Bar.  I got a good five or six minutes of footage.

Of course, the Go Pro camera has its limitations: it has a very wide-angle lens, much better for capturing sweeping landscapes than for intimate, close-up shots.  And so I was a little disappointed later in the day when I viewed my footage and found it lacked the detail I was hoping for.

But that shouldn't diminish the first-hand experience I had out on the river.  Those birds were truly beautiful.

This evening I'm still tired from my marathon session.  Generally, I don't think ultra-long training sessions are a good idea.  You can maintain good stroke form for only so long, and once that form breaks down, all you're doing is practicing poor strokes.

But training is not the main reason to go paddling.  In the scheme of things, it should be well down the list of reasons.  The experience I had in the outdoors today was hard to beat.