The Pacific Northwest is in a somewhat unusual weather pattern this year. The late spring was wetter than usual, and their normal summer is only just now settling in. Among other things, that means (a) the Columbia River is at an above-normal flow as the dams at The Dalles and Bonneville work to move the extra moisture in the watershed, and (b) those westerlies that make the Columbia Gorge a destination for wind sports are not yet blowing reliably.
Those factors combined to make for some tough racing in yesterday's Gorge Downwind Championships.
When the race started around noon we had conditions that were not great, but pretty good. I was actually quite pleased with how I handled them. I might have even been ecstatic with my performance if I hadn't flipped violently as I was carving down the face of a wave a couple of kilometers in. The boat banged against my left temple and put a bloody gash there, and it also knocked the left lens out of my cheap sunglasses (a fact I didn't realize until after the race when I took my glasses off).
I quickly remounted and worked to regain my concentration. Soon I was linking runs once more, just like the Mocke brothers taught me to do in South Africa. But then the conditions began to peter out. I kept sprinting hard after what I thought were promising runs, but the runs just didn't blossom like they were supposed to.
A similar thing happened in last year's race: some 10 kilometers in the conditions went away for a while. But around Viento State Park they began to rebuild and I ended up having huge fun all the way to the finish. I was hopeful that the same thing might happen today: as I approached Viento (viento just happens to be the Spanish word for "wind," by the way), I could feel the breeze strengthening against my back and for a brief moment it seemed like there were some good runs forming again. But just as quickly, those conditions vanished. For the last 10 kilometers of the race I was mired in a flatwater marathon, only worse, because I was fighting the Columbia's stronger-than-normal current and the water surface was bumpy and finding any kind of rhythm was difficult. At this point in the race I had exhausted myself with all the hard sprinting and didn't have much left.
And then there were the weeds.
The Columbia almost always has some floating weeds, making a weed deflector necessary. And in fact my rental ski is equipped with a deflector just fore of the rudder. But this year there are weeds in massive clumps than can overwhelm even the best weed deflector. I was doing my best to steer around them, but they seemed to become more abundant in the second half of the race. At one point a fellow racer came over to me and asked me to check his rudder; his rudder turned out to be clear, but he checked mine and found a big wad of weeds. No wonder I felt like I was working so hard, I thought.
I could see Hood River from at least eight kilometers out, but I paddled and paddled and paddled and it didn't feel like I was getting any closer to the finish. By now I wasn't particularly even racing anymore; it was obvious I wouldn't be breaking two hours, and I just wanted to get myself to the finish as painlessly as possible. As I approached Wells Island, which sits near the Oregon side some 2000 meters from the finish, I decided to go between it and the Oregon shore. In a normal year a racer wouldn't do that because the water is shallow there and there aren't any good downwind runs to catch. But with the higher river flow I figured it should be deep enough there, and that I wouldn't be fighting the full force of the current. So I went that way, feeling very smart and expecting to blow by dozens of racers who'd opted for the normal route on the other side of the island. But then I realized there was one factor I hadn't thought of: weeds. The place was teeming with mats of them. I steered around them through most of the channel, but eventually I found myself in a spot where there was no choice but to plow through them and hope for the best. "The best" is not what I got. Suddenly it felt as though the water had turned to molasses. Knowing that my race was pretty well shot, I flipped the boat and swam back to my rudder and cleared off a massive glob of weeds.
With just a couple of kilometers left I found a bit of a second wind and paddled a stronger pace toward the finish. If there had been any racers within striking distance in front of me I might have laid down the hardest sprint I could manage, but as it was I just surged at a respectable intensity and glided across the finish line.
In all, 494 boats finished the race. I was the 214th fastest at two hours, 10 minutes, 22 seconds. I was 16th out of 36 racers in the men's 50-59 age group. The complete results are posted here.
The overall winner was Kenny Rice of Cape Town, South Africa. His time was one hour, 31 minutes, 21 seconds--about 10 minutes slower than what his time would likely be in a "normal" year. Rice has now won four titles in the seven years that the Gorge Downwind Championships has taken place, and it seems more and more like this is "his" race. Last year's winner, Austin Kieffer of Venice, California, finished third just under a minute behind Kenny Rice. I was pleased to see that Jasper Mocke, one of my coaches over in South Africa, had landed in the top five: he was fifth in 1:33:23.
On the women's side, the Kiwi Danielle McKenzie clocked 1:39:55 to continue her current dominance of international surfski racing. Defending champion Ana Swetish of Bellingham, Washington, took second place 59 seconds back.
On the bank at the finish, it seemed to be the consensus among everybody from the elite athletes to the plodders that it had been a thoroughly punishing day both physically and mentally. I found Adrián and he gave me a ride back to our lodging, where I took a shower and tended to the gash above my left eye. I biked down to the race site and got a really good (and really big) burrito from the food truck there, socialized with some other racers, and watched the awards.
I slept reasonably well last night, but I remain dead-dog tired this morning. Any paddling I do today will probably be of the recovery-session variety.
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