"What a difference a day makes," the tired old saying goes. I woke up before dawn Friday and heard sleet beating against my bedroom window. By the time I was out of bed a while later the streets were thoroughly iced over. The sleet changed into plump snowflakes around nine o'clock, and by the time "Winter Storm Hunter," as I later found out it was named, had moved out, our fair city was all but shut down. Bear in mind that we're one of those Southern cities without much in the way of snow removal equipment.
Ordinarily I'd have done another round of the strength routine Friday, but the beat-up state of my body, combined with the "holiday" feel of a snow day, made me decide to take a break from that. Instead I did a full-body stretching session and soaked in the bathtub.
It was snowing again yesterday as I headed down to the river, but it didn't seem to be sticking to the streets where the previous day's traffic had blazed some decent trails. It was 23 degrees when I arrived at the marina, and the scene down at the dock looked like this:
It was definitely a day for the fleece-lined pogies.
The rudder system was all frozen up, of course. The pedals came free after about five minutes, but the rudder itself remained stuck. Fortunately it was stuck in an almost perfect straight-ahead position, so I was able to paddle toward the south end of the harbor with virtually no corrective strokes. When I did have to alter my course with some one-sided paddling, I treated it as a stroke drill and used good precise strokes. The rudder finally came loose about 20 minutes in, and from then on it was a pretty typical, if cold, 60-minute session.
Yesterday afternoon the sun came out, and that aided the clearing of the streets even though the high temperature was only about 28 degrees. This morning I headed back down to the riverfront in driving conditions that were about as good as we could ask for two days after a heavy-by-Memphis-standards winter storm. Down at the marina, where the temperature was 24 degrees, the banks were slightly less snow-covered but the dock seemed just as snowy:
Knowing my rudder would be frozen, I took a hammer with me today so I could tap the rudder-post hatch cover loose and then free the rudder by hand. The cover shattered:
I'm not really surprised: it was made of a pretty low-grade plastic and had been exposed to years worth of ultraviolet radiation, and the cold temperature just made it that much more brittle. Fortunately a rudder post hatch cover is not an especially essential piece of equipment.
On my way out of the harbor I did three 8-stroke sprints. Out on the Mississippi I paddled up along the Tennessee side to the mouth of the Wolf River. As I came back down there was some turbulence in the water from a couple of barge rigs, and my main priority was staying upright--I did not want to go swimming on a day like today.
Once back in the harbor's safe haven I tried to take the most perfect strokes I could to make up for the de-tuning out on the river. In his clinic back in October, Morgan House had urged his pupils to focus on one aspect of the stroke at a time, and that's what I did here. I'd concentrate on exiting close to the boat for a couple dozen strokes, then I'd concentrate on having the shaft as close to vertical as possible at the catch for the next little while, and then I'd concentrate on rotating my body... there's never an end of things to think about.
No comments:
Post a Comment