Red Stick Racing

I'm back home from my whirlwind trip to Baton Rouge.  I ran down there Friday; shared a hotel room with fellow racer Phil Capel of Sherwood, Arkansas; raced yesterday morning; hung around the post-race party until the awards; and motored back up here to good old Memphis, Tennessee.

The Big River Regional race started right at downtown Baton Rouge, several hundred meters above the Mississippi River (Interstate 10) Bridge.  The starting line was out in the downstream flow, and with just over 200 paddlers registered, there was some bumping and jostling as we tried to stay in position while waiting for the gun to go off.

The gun did go off right on time, good for a check in the "plus" column of my mental evaluation of the event.  I hurried out into the main current and was joined by Kata Dismukes, whose company I'd expected, and an outrigger C-2 paddled by Gary and Matt Wise, with whom I was unfamiliar.

When I have the early lead in a race, I have to decide whether I should try to put the thing away early or hang back and exchange wake rides with other paddlers for a while.  After some internal deliberation I chose the former tactic and opened up a gap... and not much later I was wondering if that had been a mistake.  Fatigue seemed to be setting in sooner than usual, and with nearly half the race still ahead of me, I began to shift from "attack" mode to "maintain position" mode.

As I approached the big leftward bend in the river that leads into the long homestretch, the OC-2 was hanging in there over my right shoulder and Ted Burnell, a surf ski paddler from Chattanooga, had moved up onto my stern.  Ted then moved to my left and took a much tighter line through the bend than I'd intended to take.  I'd have preferred to stay out in somewhat faster water, but I didn't want to lose contact with Ted, so I played it his way, and by the time we were emerging from the bend he had taken the lead and I was sitting on his stern wake, hoping to chill out for a while and conserve energy for a strong finish.

Over to our right the OC-2 was mounting a strong surge and in a matter of minutes it would take the lead.  This is where some might argue that I should have just let them go, and focus on winning my own class.  But in situations like this my ego and macho insecurity have a way of kicking in: I wanna be the first boat across the line, by golly.  So I dug in and moved onto the OC-2's wake.

With an Australian accent, the stern paddler said to me, "Be careful mate--they might not like you drafting outside o'class."  I replied that I hadn't heard the race director say anything about it.  It's an issue I'm aware of, and I've always understood that it's up to each race organizer whether drafting outside of class is allowed in his event; if there had been an announcement declaring the tactic illegal, I'd have gladly abided by it.  But having heard nothing, I'd assumed that all wakes were fair game.  In any case, I spent the last couple of miles sitting there wondering if I'd be summarily DQ'd at the finish.

As we entered the last several hundred meters to the finish, it was obvious that the OC-2 had a lot more juice left than I did.  I made a game attempt to sprint for the win, but my arms were tying up and the outrigger glided away beyond my reach.  And then I noticed Ted closing fast on my left.  The finish buoys were placed at a bizarre angle and I wasn't sure I had Ted beat until the very last stroke.

I half expected the OC-2 stern paddler to lay into me with a lecture, but instead he just smiled and said "Nice job, mate."  I responded in kind, and asked where he was from.  I think he told me he was now living in Austin, though he was clearly a native Aussie.  I didn't have much time to process our conversation because when I got out of my boat I sank thigh-deep in ultra-fine silt.  "On the mat!  On the mat!" shouted a girl who was helping finishers onto a rubberized plastic mat where they would not be subsumed into the fabled Mississippi Mud.

Kata Dismukes came into the finish several minutes behind Ted to take the female title, both overall and in the surf ski class.  I later learned that she had been struggling with shoulder pain for the entire race.

All told, I had an enjoyable trip and am satisfied with how I did.  What's next?  I'm not sure.  For today, I plan to go downtown for a short recovery paddle and put my boat away at the marina.  I'm tentatively planning to do a low-key event, the Gator Bait Race, on September 19.  A couple of friends have encouraged me to enter the North Shore Cup, north-northwest of Charleston on Lake Marion, on October 17; I'll have to see how the next few weeks of paddling go and how I'm feeling and how eager I am to drive all the way over there.

We'll see.