Warm weather fun

This week we've had plentiful sunshine and near-record-high temperatures for late October.  I've had ideas floating around in my head about moving to some dry-land training for a while--lots of leg and core exercises, mainly--but as long as it's as warm as it's been it seems to make sense to stay in the boat a little longer.

I paddled for 60 minutes both Tuesday and yesterday.  Both days I found conveniently-placed barge traffic out on the Mississippi and tried to do some surfing.  The waves weren't especially easy to catch, and I wonder if the low water level has something to do with that--it's currently -9.2 feet on the Memphis gauge.  And the towboat pilot I tried to surf behind yesterday was a real grump who apparently doesn't like anybody having fun while he has to work.  He gave me five (5) angry blasts on his horn.  If I could have talked to him, I would have made the same point I made here a couple of months ago: as long as it's okay for him to churn up waves on our river, it's okay for me to go out and try to surf them.

Anyway, I probably won't have many more days of favorable conditions for surfing out there.  This warm weather won't last forever, and the Mississippi's water gets very cold in the winter and I won't have much desire to get wet out there until late next spring.

I also prefer warm weather for bike riding.  I planned to ride Wednesday morning, but I discovered my bike had a flat tire and all the spare tubes I had required patching before they'd be usable.  Yes, I know a lot of riders just throw out punctured tubes and replace them with brand-new ones, but I have a hard time throwing a tube in the garbage when one pin-prick hole is the only thing wrong with it.  Anyway... instead of riding, I spent Wednesday morning patching all my spare tubes.  That pushed the riding back to this morning, when I took advantage of another lovely warm day to take the Greenline out to Shelby Farms and back.

It looks like tomorrow and Sunday will be some ten degrees cooler than it's been the last several days.  But it'll still be nice for paddling.

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