Tuesday morning I did a gym session and then headed down to the river for some paddling. When I reached the mouth of the harbor I saw the fuel barge that services touring riverboats coming the Mississippi, so I paddled out to inspect its wake. I surfed a tiny bit but there wasn't really much action. After that I went over to the Arkansas side and paddled upriver. There's a series of wing dams over there, and with the river flowing at 16.4 feet on the Memphis gauge they were well underwater but creating lots of boily water, and I had some fun paddling through that. Back when I was racing whitewater slalom I really struggled with keeping my boat gliding and making precise moves in boily water, and even today I make a point of working on that. A 6.4-meter-long surfski with a rudder is a lot easier to keep gliding than a rudderless slalom boat that's no more than four meters long, but I still enjoy it when I can master this old slalom nemesis.
Tuesday was probably the most oppressively hot day we've had since I returned from my vacation, and as I paddled up the harbor back toward the dock I did some remount practice to cool off--twice from the left and twice from the right, because I like symmetry.
Yesterday morning there was some rain headed this way. A look at the Internet radar showed a huge mass of rain over Arkansas, but it was moving eastward slowly enough that I thought I could get in a bike ride before it moved in. The western sky looked pretty clear when I left the house, but by the time I was at my turnaround point at Shelby Farms there were dark clouds on the horizon. I hoped for the best as I pedaled back toward home, but a few stray raindrops turned into a steady drizzle, and over the last couple of kilometers I got pretty good and soaked. Fortunately I was in my last ten minutes of riding by this time. And of course, "skin is waterproof," as we used to say at camp.
This morning I was back in the boat. Commercial traffic has been scarce when I've been down there for the last couple of weeks, but when I reached the mouth of the harbor today there was a nice big barge rig moving upstream on that section of the river. I paddled out and found waves that were less steep than normal, and they flattened out quickly the farther I got from the towboat's screws. I did lots and lots of hard sprints and got only a handful of brief rides, but the effort was fun. I've really enjoyed using a more stable ski than the one I've usually kept on the riverfront, as I'm seeing all kinds of little things I'm able to do that I couldn't before.
The nice thing about yesterday's rain is that it's cooled things off here. Today's high temperature was in the mid 80s Fahrenheit. I can't ask for better than that in the middle of July.
I haven't paddled the whitewater boat since Sunday. I've been feeling a lot of soreness in my hips and lower back lately, and I think that was caused by all the Eskimo rolling and aggressive hip-snapping drills I did over the weekend. So it's probably not a bad idea to give that area some extra time to recover.
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