Back toward home

My eight-day class at the Maine Coast Craft School is complete, and while it was a good experience, I'm glad to be moving back south at last.

I can say for certain that I'm really ready to be back home.  By the time I get there I'll have been away almost four weeks, and that's the longest time I've been away from home in over 20 years.

I do have a race scheduled for next Saturday, August 5: I'm signed up to participate in the Three Rivers Regatta at Knoxville.  I'm doing the 6-mile event, so I need to get back in the boat in the next few days and try to rediscover some speed.  There will be some other good racers there, but almost all of them have opted for the 24-mile race, something I would have no desire to do even if I weren't at the tail end of a long trip.

It would be very easy to skip the Knoxville event altogether and just go home, but it's good to have a reason not to rush.  For instance, I'll be seeing my buddy Rob in the Hudson Valley of New York, and I think I'll spend a couple of nights there and get a good visit rather than drop in for a quick hello and push on.

This past week was primarily consumed by my class, but I did get to paddle a couple of times.  The school property is on the shore of Boyd Pond, which, unlike our "lakes" down South that are really just dammed-up reservoirs, is a natural feature of a river system (the Pemaquid River).  One evening I paddled my surfski along the perimeter of the pond (which is really a decent-sized lake), and another evening I played around in my whitewater boat.  The water was very pleasant.

So in the space of ten days or so I did some pretty good paddling in the state of Maine: some flatwater, some whitewater, and some open water, using both the boats I had with me.

I'm spending this evening in Portsmouth, the largest city on the very brief New Hampshire coast.  I hope to get out and paddle in the morning.  I did paddle in New Hampshire when I was in New England in the summer of 2016, but it was a rather cursory outing where the Connecticut River forms the border between New Hampshire and Vermont, so it'll be nice to pad my Granite State paddling resume a bit.

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